18 May 2019, Vanguard Headquarters, Team Ready Room, Astoria, OR
“All-in-all a very nice takedown maneuver by Totem and Quanta,” Artemis said, gesturing at the image in the holo-display floating over the center of the table. “The APD Meta Crimes Unit is holding her in the City Jail’s special containment section, sedated, until SHADE can arrange for secure transport to the Forty Fathoms Super Max.”
“When do they expect to move her?” Quanta asked, staring down at the empty table in front of him and tapping a finger in an arhythmic beat on its glassy surface. His tone was suspiciously diffident.
“Captain Winters says SHADE told him to be ready “soon,” but that they’re keeping the precise timing vague even with the APD,” Scion said, shooting a wary glance at his friend. “And us, apparently. There’s some concern about that idiot Oblivion… or someone… trying to break her out in transit.”
Quanta looked up, frowning, and started to say something sharp, when Totem gave a strangled gasp and staggered to his feet, grasping the edge of the table in a white-knuckled grip. His eyes were glazed, as if they no longer saw the room around him, and his body went rigid. “Devaj!” was the only word he managed to push past clenched teeth. He was aware of his teammates leaping to their feet, but their words were distant…
Cooper had only been half-listening to the debriefing session (he’d been there, after all, he knew what had happened). Most of his thoughts were on his upcoming dinner with Meg that evening. It was ostensibly to celebrate her well-received article covering the third anniversary of the Astoria Incident, which had run in the Oregonian two days ago and been picked up by the Daily Star as well. But in fact he intended for it to commemorate the third anniversary of their renewed relationship. He had arranged a surprise dinner for them, made up of dishes from her favorite food carts around the city. He rather thought he was finally getting the hang of this whole romantic relationship thing —
Küng of Sgang Gwaay Llanagaay Island! Help us!
The psychic cry slammed into his brain like a lightning strike, and with it came a kaleidoscope of images, sounds and emotions. He saw the grand entrance foyer to a stately old Victorian… he knew it, the former home of Arkanos, Roland Reid, the late Magus Prime… current home of his widower, Devaj Archaya… “Devaj!” He gasped out, recognizing the voice in his head… feelings of anger… and fear… washed over him… the image of a beautiful woman… a hulking shape behind her… other dark shapes… then four men in brown robes… no, not men, lizard men, Serpent People… the sounds of conflict, shouts, an explosion…
The Sanctum… wards have been breached… invaders…
Psychic static washed out much of what Devaj was trying to convey, only the emotion coming through whole. He strained to make out the words.
…no time… the fight to… you must…
There was a flare of light, followed by an agonizing sense of pain… Cooper clutched at his right shoulder —
…Quanta reached out to grasp Totem’s arm, and his teammate collapsed, suddenly limp. Quanta settled his friend back into his station chair as the others gathered around, concerned looks on their faces.
“I’m… I’m alright,” Totem said. The pain faded, if less quickly than the visions, and he sat up, visibly gaining strength as he spoke. “We have to move quickly — the Sanctum Primus has been attacked, its defenses are breached. I fear Devaj has been injured, or worse. Enemies are already inside, I think, and more are gathering. How quickly can we reach New Atlantis?”
“I’m sending word to the hanger now, the ground crew will start prepping the Interceptor,” Scion said, his helmet forming around his head as he spoke. “We can be in the air in ten minutes, and in New Atlantis in under an hour.”
“Damn!” Totem was on his feet again, and he turned to Quanta. “Is there any way you can extend one of your quantum tunnels that far? Any way to boost your range that much?”
“I’m sorry,” his friend said, shaking his head. “I’ve been working on extending my range, yeah, but I’ve never even come close to continental distances.”
“Artemis, I know you can shadow-step that far, and you’ve been to the Sanctum,” Totem turned to the black-cloaked woman. “You can’t take us all, but what if you and I make the jump? We might be able to hold off the invaders long enough for the others to reach us.”
“I don’t like splitting the team,” Scion said. “Is the danger that imminent? What about the Alliance, or the Sampson’s? They’re all much closer, if they could hold things together until we arrive —“
“The danger really is that great,” Artemis said before Totem could reply. “The Sanctum of the Magus Prime holds some of the most powerful — and in the wrong hands deadly — arcane artifacts outside of Shambhala itself. They must be protected.
“This attack is suspiciously well-timed – the Sampson family are all out in the Belt just now, and once again many of the most powerful Alliance members are out of the city or even off-planet. And in any case, since the loss of Sabra, neither team has anyone well-versed in magic. Whoever is orchestrating this is clearly well-informed. I too dislike splitting the team, John, but in this instance I fear we must. Cooper’s plan appears to be the optimal solution.”
“OK, agreed,” Scion said. “Take what you need in the way of – wait, something is coming through Dispatch… reports are flooding the emergency lines about a sudden, large group of meta-humans just appearing… that’s very odd, it appears to be a huge supervillain free-for-all in a suburban neighborhood… Apollo Terraces, that moderately swanky development on the southern edge of the city… that psychotic biker gang the Devil’s Advocates have been confirmed —“
“What?” Totem barked. “They were in the vision Devaj sent in his call for help — they were still outside the Sanctum, seemed to be fighting others, I couldn’t make out who, but I definitely recognized them from that fight Blue Flame and I had with them last year.”
Totem bent down to tap a couple of buttons on the console set in the table top at his station, bringing up a map of the city in the the central holo-display. Apollo Terraces was a large subdivision on the southern slopes of Union Hill, its streets set in widening semicircles down the hill’s face, with stunning views across the Cascadia National Forest to Mt. Defiance.
“Quanta, that’s within your tunneling range, isn’t it?” he asked, pointing at the glowing red emergency symbol flashing near the top of the neighborhood.
“Well, yes,” his teammate replied, looking puzzled. “But what about this attack in New Atlantis, on this so-called Sanctum Mysterioso, or whatever? I thought you were hot to—“
“This is the attack on the Sanctum,” Totem said impatiently. “The Sanctum is not so much a physical place as a concept, a moveable feast… it’s been in one place for a very long time, thanks to Roland’s powerful will; but I think now, with no Magus in residence, it’s responding to its caretaker’s wishes. I think that’s what Devaj was trying to tell me, at the end — that he was bringing the fight to me. To us. The Sanctum Primus has relocated itself to Astoria. Now, can you open a tunnel to that spot, or not?”
With a doubtful glance at Artemis and Scion, Quanta shrugged and nodded. Gesturing towards the rooms southern wall of windows he willed a portal into existence in front of them, connecting the Vanguard’s Ready Room with a spot several miles to their southeast… as the shimmering-edged opening widened it revealed a pleasant looking suburban street, glistening in the gentle rain of a Pacific Northwest spring morning — with two burning police cars and a number of bodies, mostly costumed or uniformed, scattered artfully around them.
“Game time!” Chilz cried, grinning as he stepped through the portal, the Blue Flame hot on his heels…
• • • • • •
The Vanguard stepped into chaos. Several more police cars were pulling up as Quanta’s portal closed behind the heroes, staying well back from the two burning and partially crushed cruisers askew in the street. Several dozen by-standers were gathered across the street and to either side of a meta-human free-for-all, phones out to record the action and apparently oblivious to their own danger. The cops turned their attention to crowd control as soon as they spotted the heroes.
Already half-a-dozen costumed bodies were down, presumably all of the villainous persuasion, along with at least four uniformed police officers. Whatever fight had gone down, it was being carried on now by several still-standing villains in front of a large Craftsman-style mansion, set back from the street in an expansive property behind a high stone wall.
Three degenerate-looking bikers on customized motorcycles circled a woman, at least seven feet tall, in the open yard and driveway. As they watched, the woman, who seemed to be made of living sand, delivered a roundhouse body blow with a massive fist at the end of a grotesquely extended arm to one of the bikers, who went down in a tangle of blood, teeth and twisted metal. He joined a fourth biker already down near the steps to the front door.
The iron gates across the driveway stood twisted open, and framed in them was a bizarre tableau. A tuxedoed, opera cloaked and top-hatted stage magician seemed to be putting on a show for the gathered crowd of by-standers. But he was not your garden variety magician… his skin was pale, with a greenish cast, and patches of scabrous flesh peeled away on face and hands to reveal white bone. He was “assisted” by a dozen other zombies, of more conventional appearance, half of them cadaverous women in tattered, fraying, spangled costumes.
“I recognize this one,” Totem said over comms. “He’s an undead former stage magician, calls himself Abracadaver. He may look like a bad joke, but he’s actually a disturbingly powerful magic user – and dangerous.” The zombie magician continued addressing the crowd with his florid patter, seemingly oblivious to the heroes as long as he had an enthralled audience .
“Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, these marvelous volunteers will soon have you gasping in amazement and disbelief as they assist me up here on stage. You won’t believe your eyes as I work my magic upon them!”
He gestured grandly at four by-standers, local residents by the look of them, who his zombie assistants had apparently kidnapped for his act – one woman was surrounded by three flaming hoops, another was struggling against smoky black tendrils that were slowly pulling her into a large top hat; two others, a man and a woman, were imprisoned in transparent boxes, only heads and feet protruding – and their torsos apparently swapped. Three of the undead assistants stood by each victim, gesturing randomly as Abracadaver chattered on merrily. He seemed to thrive on drawing out the suspense…
Scion sent a stream of electro bolts straight into his center of mass, but Abracadaver noticed neither the impacts nor the electrical jolt. Somehow, while dramatically bowing to his left the undead performer managed to turn out of the way of the stream of bucky balls Quanta hurled at him; he then pirouetted right to bow to the other side of “the house” and in doing so avoided the lash of Artemis’ shadow whip.
Chilz, meanwhile, had ice-ramped up and over the wall surrounding the mansion to deal with the remaining Devil’s Advocates, who remained engaged with the sand woman. She was almost as tall as he was, and pretty hot looking, for a chick apparently made of billions of grains of sand. Well, who are you to talk, Ice Boy?
As he glided down over the tall stone wall he saw one biker, with a spiked German WWI helmet, swing a wicked looking war axe at the woman — she dodged aside with surprising grace, given her size and apparent mass. In turn she gestured at the biker and a stream of coarse sand blasted out from her arm to strike him in the side. He roared in rage, but didn’t lose control of his bike, apparently more angry than injured.
It was the sand blast that dropped the dime for Chilz – he remembered who she was now, he’d read a dossier on her last month, during one of Scion and Artemis‘ on-going education briefings. Maggie Mueller, aka Sandblaster, a mercenary soldier who’d stumbled across some ancient temple out in the Iraqi dessert several years ago and gained her meta-human powers. The second Devil’s Advocate was circling behind her, whirling a vicious chain over his head, preparing to lash out with it, and Chilz began to form an ice cage around him. But the chain must’ve been as uncanny as its owner, because it smashed through the thick ice bars as they formed, like they were glass.
For his trouble the ice giant took a solid blow to the back from the first biker’s glowing axe, sending radial fracture lines up his torso and staggering him forward – and straight into a roundhouse punch to the jaw from Sandblaster. As he went flying backwards, smashing into a large ornamental fountain, he heard her laugh and call out to the biker.
“Well, at least you’re good for a distraction, Cueball, if nothing else!”
Chilz grinned as the water of the fountain immediately began healing the various micro fractures in his ice form, and he felt his strength increasing…
Blue Flame was attempting a cage as well, his made of the controlled plasma from his own body, to try and contain Abracadaver before the moldering magician could finish his spiel and really get started on his “act.” That seemed like it might not be too great a thing for his “volunteers.” The cage at least managed to finally get the performer’s attention, but with a wave of his ratty old wand he somehow dissipated the flaming bars.
Looking peeved, he glared up at the hovering hero. A bolt of solid black energy lanced upwards from the tip of the wand, striking Blue Flame square in the chest and sending him tumbling backwards. A disturbing wave of cold washed over him as he struggled to right himself, and his azure glow dimmed visibly.
Fortunately for Blue Flame, before the zombie magician could follow up on this disturbing attack he was forced to dodge a plummeting block of solid carbon which Quanta had called into being over his head. With a twirl of his cloak, Abracadaver was suddenly not under the block, which hit the ground with a thud, but instead five feet to the left. With an imperious gesture, he waved several of his zombie “assistants” to converge on the silvery hero, but by then the Blue Flame had recovered. He swooped in, this time wielding a flaming katana, and the undead minions collapsed in a pile of cauterized limbs, suddenly inert once more as their animating force was burned away.
Scion took the opportunity to blast Abracadaver with his Brain Tickler, but quickly realized it was unlikely to affect an already dead, if somehow still functioning, brain. Damn, he hated this supernatural shit almost as much as Quanta did, even if he didn’t share his friend’s doubts about its true nature. The thought was cut short as several twisting tendrils of deep black snaked out of the undead magician’s torso, leaping upward to encircle the armored hero. Arms and legs pinned tight by their cold, draining energy, they began to pull him down…
Back on the mansions grounds, one of the bikers (Born Loser according to the whispered note from Scion’s TacComp transmitted to Chilz’ earpiece) was roaring up the driveway, headed for the front doors to the Sanctum. Flush with moisture, Chilz gestured and a thick wall of ice began to form almost faster than the eye could follow, completely sealing off the entrance. The biker turned his bike only just in time, sliding into the barrier sideways rather than head on. Glaring, he spewed a string of frustrated curses at the towering ice giant.
Out in the street, Totem had been gathering his own mystic energies, and he now cast the most powerful dispel incantation he was capable of, directed against Abracadaver, his minions and, most importantly, the magical “props” imprisoning and threatening the innocent neighbors. As he’d feared, the spell did nothing against the magician or his zombies – their state of undeath was no simple magic, but something deeper and more powerful. But the items holding the prisoners were the product of true magic, and as such they evaporated like dew in the summer sun under the power of his counter-spell. The four victims, finding themselves free, scattered in four different directions, dodging the clumsy, grasping hands of the undead minions. Mostly.
With Artemis and Totem running interference, taking out zombies that got too close, three of Abracadaver’s would-be victims made it to safety behind the police cordon. But the fourth, the woman who had been farthest from help, the one imprisoned by the flaming hoops, was grabbed by two zombies and dragged back to their undead master. The magician wrapped a cold, desiccated arm around her throat, but as he did so Scion burst the grip of the black tendrils imprisoning him, shredding them to mist.
Before he could take aim at the stage magician again, however, he was suddenly overcome by a wave of unrelenting hunger and weakness… he felt as if he hadn’t eaten in days, at least. He was suddenly shaky, trembling inside his armor. It took all his will power to keep gravity from bringing him to the ground, stumbling as he touched down under his own power. Above Scion, Blue Flame was suffering even greater symptoms of starvation, which confused the hell out of him – he never felt hungry or tired in his plasma form, yet now he felt both, cramping up from apparent starvation and feeling weak with exhaustion…
In the driveway, Chilz felt the wave of hunger and weakness wash over him as well, and he had eyes on the reason – that bastard Born Loser had come to a halt near the gates and had stood up, straddling his bike, hands raised above his head like some demented Nixon saluting a crowd. Waves of almost invisible energy radiated from those hands, washing over everyone in a 10 meter radius, and with those waves came the hunger. The Devil’s Advocates were supposed to be modern incarnations of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, and Chilz realized Born Loser must be Starvation. The riders must also be immune to one another’s powers, for Cueball was well within the area of effect, but remained untouched; Sandblaster, however, staggered back from the axe-wielding biker, looking suddenly pale, shaken, and ill…
It was Artemis who took the worst of the effect, collapsing to the street in front of a smoldering police car just as she handed off the last victim to the cops. It was as if all the nourishment she’d taken over the last 150 years had suddenly been withdrawn… her mind grew dark and confused, and for a moment she thought she was back in Tulip Hill Hall, as a young girl. There had been that one winter, after the War, when there hadn’t been enough food… she’d been so hungry… and Toby had given her some of his own food… she struggled to pull herself back to the now, away from those painful memories…
Totem, outside the effective radius of Born Loser’s power, saw his teammates reel, and Artemis go down – she looked suddenly emaciated and aged. He realized immediately what was happening… his own mystic senses saw the apocalyptic energies more clearly than the others could, and he lashed out with his Winding Whip spell. The glowing tendril of violet energy wrapped around the demonic biker, and he yanked hard – Born Loser stumbled over his bike, going to his knees on the gravel… his power faltered and faded, even as he released a flare of hellfire that burned quickly through the spectral whip.
With the source gone, Artemis quickly began to throw off the effects of the mystical starvation; her innate regenerative powers had her back on her feet in less than a minute. “Scion, Born Loser is the primary threat at the moment, we need to take him out fast,” she called over comms. After dodging a blast from the Blue Flame, the biker had somehow taken to the air himself on his bike, and was futilely attempting to whip-chain the young hero. Quanta had managed to encase Abracadaver’s remaining victim in one of his carbon sheaths, leaving the performer without victims and so neutralizing his greatest threat, at least for the moment.
“Agreed,” Scion said, and he unleashed a Brain Zap at the Devil’s Advocate. He was gratified to see that, whatever uncanny powers these bikers possessed, they still had functioning brains. Of a sort. Born Loser almost lost control of his air-borne bike, righted it, and then did lose control as a chunk of masonry hurled by Artemis slammed into his back. He flew over the handlebars and bike and biker both slammed down into Abracadaver, and then the ground. Limbs entangled in the smoking bike, Born Loser groaned and struggled to get up.
Cueball roared up behind Artemis, attempting to grab her in his hairy arms, but she spun, kicked and vaulted over the biker, coming down in a crouch well away from him. This left him positioned just a few feet from both his partner, who was still disentangling himself from his bike, and the undead magician. Quanta took advantage of this fortuitous alignment of villainy to drop another massive block on the gathered foes.
Cueball managed to avoid the slab, if barely, by taking to the air himself, and Abracadaver simply shrugged it off, as he had the earlier impact from Born Loser and his bike. But the third Advocate had taken the blow full on, just as he’d staggered upright, and he was now down for the count.
The zombie magician was looking truly peeved at this point. He was simply livid at the indignity of it all… the loss of his victims, the loss of the last of his minions, and the loss of his audience – the police had finally managed to get the neighborhood gawkers well back and mainly out of earshot – it really was just too much to bear!
“Very well then,” he declaimed with a dramatic flourish of his tattered, stained cloak. “If my talents of prestidigitation and wonderment are not appreciated here, then I will simply have to seek a more appreciative venue elsewhere; perhaps in a somewhat less bourgeoise milieu.” Tipping his battered top hat, he bowed towards the heroes and vanished in a sudden swirling cloud of dead black smoke.
The heroes wasted no time worrying about the zombie, and both Scion and Quanta unleashed blasts at Cueball as he roared in from above for another attack on Artemis, glowing axe raised high. The stream of electro bolts and bucky balls struck him full on, staggering him , and Artemis snapped her whip upward, its black shadow-cord wrapping around the handlebars. With a sharp, hard yank downward, she sent both man and machine crashing into the stone wall surrounding the Sanctum, and the last of the Devil’s Advocates was hors ‘d combat.
Beyond that wall, in the driveway and large front yard, Chilz and Sandblaster continued to slug it out. Earlier, as he’d caught that maniac Cueball’s axe between his palms, encasing it momentarily in a sheath of ice, she had taken advantage of his distraction to deliver another sneak attack, which had sent him reeling and allowed the biker to free his axe.
“Clearly you two wanna be alone,” Cueball had sniggered, and then roared out to join the fight in the street.
“What is your problem, lady?” Chilz demanded, rubbing his jaw. “You were already fighting those assholes before we got here, hell, I even came over here to give you a hand – so why are you helping them now?”
“Aww, aren’t you the chivalrous knight in icy armor, coming to the defense of helpless lil ole me,” Sandblaster laughed. She sounded like she was from somewhere in the South, but with a hint of something foreign. “Honey, they were just in my way, and so are you. Although, I gotta admit, you’re a lot easier on the eye (and the nose) than that pack of Outsiders rejects. Maybe we should grab a drink sometime, Liebling… when we’re not on opposite sides, of course.”
While he was still trying to figure out if she was serious, she delivered another roundhouse punch that he didn’t see coming. Damn, he thought muzzly as he flew through the air, I keep forgetting about her reach with that sand arm… and that frickin’ fist… and then he’d blacked out. Not for long, fortunately, as she had once again sent him flying into a fountain, this time on the opposite side of the yard. He was awake and regenerating again in less than a minute, as the water sublimated into his frozen form to rejuvenate him.
Chilz shook his head, clearing the last of the haze from his mind, to see her blasting away like her namesake at his ice barrier in front of the mansion’s doors. She was very focused… and given enough time, she could actually abrade his ice wall to nothing… but maybe this time he could get in his own sneak attack…
Before he could blast her, however, the Blue Flame was there, encasing Sandblaster in a cylinder of blue plasma. “Let’s see how you do as glass,” the hovering hero laughed. “Not so tough then, I’m guessing.”
“Sorry kid,” the mercenary laughed. “My body ain’t made of regular sand, in case you hadn’t noticed – and I don’t fuse into glass, at least not at any temperature I’ve been hit with so far. It’s not like you’re the first guy to think of that.
“And I’m pretty much immune to cold, too… but I’m not anxious to find out how I’d do against both at once. And Scheisse, no one is paying me for this job, I just thought I might pick up something aufregend when I heard this dump was ripe for the plucking. Who knew it’d turn out to be Grand Central Station? Time to cut my losses, I think. It was fun, though, Chilz, and I was serious about that drink sometime… you’re one tall, cool drink of water, and I don’t often meet guys taller than me.”
With that her body seemed to lose cohesion, and she collapsed to the gravel of the driveway as a simple pile of sand… a pile which quickly vanished into the ground. In seconds she was gone.
“Wait a minute… Chuck, were you fighting her, or trying to make time with her,” Jonny laughed, his plasma cage dissipating once it was obvious the mercenary was really gone. “You dog, you!”
Chilz just rolled his eyes, and stumped back to the nearest of the shattered fountains to finish recharging. “No comment. And we’re in the field – use code names, doofus. If Artemis had caught that, you’d be doing another week of late-night monitor duty, buddy.”
•••••••
“Frankly,” Quanta was saying to Scion when Chilz and the Blue Flame rejoined the others on the street, “I think a Sharknado is more likely than so-called magic as an explanation for—”
“We need to get inside,” Totem said in clipped tones, absently signing off on whatever paperwork the SHADE Agent-in-Charge shoved at him. “Chilz, can you remove your ice barrier? Which was an excellent idea, by the way, thank you for keeping everyone out.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Chilz said, turning reluctantly back from scanning the street. No reporters within earshot, just lots of SHADE agents slapping power restraints on unconscious evil-doers. No chance to give an interview, but at least that meant it was unlikely there’d be any footage on the news tonight of his being used as a punching bag. He turned back toward the mansion, and mentally ordered his partially eroded wall of ice to evaporate…
Artemis had taken over dealing with Agent Alex Vezini from the distracted Totem, while Scion took his fretful teammate off to the side. “Totem, I know it’s urgent, and you’re worried about your friend. But we are not going to go charging in without some idea of who might be there ahead of us. Especially not into someplace as… odd… as the Sanctum Primus. It’s dangerous enough on its own, without super-powered criminals waiting to ambush us.
“Look, I’ve hacked into all of the local security footage – thank God for doorbell cameras and paranoid homeowners. I’ve got at least three decent angles on the front of the house here.”
Scion tapped a key on his wrist comp, and a holographic screen popped into existence over his forearm. It showed the street in front of the Craftsman mansion with a time stamp of 20 minutes earlier… if this footage was anything to go by, the house had always been there, peacefully minding its own business… and then a dozen costumed figures appeared, apparently from thin air, already heavily involved in a massive free-for-all. He tapped again, and the footage sped up.
Three figures, a petite woman accompanied by a massive, hulking brute of a man in ragged, ill-fitting clothes and a smaller figure in blue-black armor, could just be seen slipping inside the mansion’s front doors, less than a minute into the action. Five minutes later four brown-robed figures also slipped inside, followed two minutes later by a dark, shadowy figure that was impossible to make out. Five minutes after that the Vanguard arrived. Looking over Scion’s shoulder, Chilz winced. There was a surprisingly good angle on that last roundhouse punch which had laid him out, even if only momentarily. He just hoped the press didn’t get hold of the damn video…
“OK, it doesn’t look like anyone else got in,” Scion said, shutting down the playback. “Not least because of that ice wall of yours, Chilz. Good tactical thinking. The quality of the footage isn’t good enough at these ranges to make out faces… did anyone recognize any of the eight individuals who managed to get in?”
No one did, although Artemis suspected the hulking man might well be the strange, supernatural creature known as the Revenant. But if so, she had no idea who the woman was. “Although she must be formidable, if she can control that nearly mindless brute.”
“Agent Venzini,” Totem called to the SHADE commander, who was overseeing the last of the defeated super-criminals into a secure vehicle. “Keep your people, and the police, and anyone else out of that building. It’s not safe for anyone at this point, but we’re going in. Let me emphasize, do not allow anyone else to follow us inside, under any circumstances.”
The agent nodded acknowledgment, looking worried, and the Vanguard moved forward past the twisted gates and up the steps of the massive front porch, Totem leading the way. The elegant double entry doors had frosted glass panels, etched with a simple Craftsman motif, and opened easily under the shaman’s hand. They stepped into the foyer, a wood-paneled antechamber with floors inlaid with colorful tiles in pleasing geometric patterns. Half-glazed doorways to either side opened onto sitting rooms or parlors, used to entertain invitees. But in the center of the large entry space four unconscious brown-robed bodies were scattered about. Inhuman figures, a closer look revealed – all four were quasi-reptilian, obviously Serpent People. Each clutched a curved dagger in their scaly hands.
On the far side of the room an older man, fully human, with salt-and-pepper hair and a red dot on his forehead, dressed in a charcoal suit, was sprawled at the foot of a large statue of a winged woman. Blood was pouring from a wound on his left arm and pooling on the tile floor around him.
“Devaj!” Totem cried, and rushed to his friend’s side. The old man looked up at him with glazed eyes… after a moment he managed a weak smile of recognition. “Küng,” he mumbled weakly. “This… this is exactly… why I so… dislike unexpected visitors, yes?” His eyes rolled back in his head, and he lolled back limply in Totem’s arms.
“Damn, if he’s been bitten by one of those damn reptiles, he needs immediate attention – their bite is extremely venomous.” He was tearing the old Indian’s jacket and shirt away form the wound as he spoke, revealing a deep series of nasty puncture wounds. “I can use a healing spell to draw out the poison; Quanta, can you use your own healing ability to begin repairing the physical damage?”
For once passing up the opportunity to make a snarky comment about magic, Quanta knelt at the old man’s other side and began expanding his quantum consciousness into the wound. He could sense the lethal poison being drawn out by whatever energy his teammate was using, and he noted the procedure… he was still unable to do much with things like poison, or cancer, or other subtle biological problems. He was mostly good for physical trauma; but seeing Totem’s healing in action, on the quantum level, gave him some new insights… yes, this suggested a new approach he might take… but of course this was’t the time or place. He focused his mind on knitting back together the torn flesh of the Sanctum’s guardian.
Once the old man was stabilized, Scion carried him into the western sitting room and laid him on a sofa, while Chilz piled up the unconscious Serpent People before tossing them out the door for SHADE to gather up. “I wonder how the old guy took all four of them out without leaving a mark on any of ‘em,” he said to Artemis, as she firmly shut the doors behind him, cutting off Agent Venzini’s worried questions… apparently he’d never seen actual Serpent People before.
“At a guess, I’d say he did it with those,” Artemis replied, pointing to a series of strange sigils crudely painted on the inside of the doors and on the walls to either side. “Everyone tends to forget, living in Roland’s shadow as he did, that Devaj is a competent sorcerer in his own right. Maybe not up to his husband’s weight, but skilled enough to cast protective runes to bolster the house’s failing wards. Unfortunately, those bastards of the Brood of the Bronze Claw are surprisingly tough… obviously one of them held mis together long enough to get in at least one solid attack.”
Stepping back into the drawing room they saw Totem gently pulling a small silver hand-mirror from Devaj’s grip, quite strong even in unconsciousness. “Sabra…” the old Indian whispered before sinking back into deep sleep.
“He’ll need a few hours, at least, to fully recover,” Totem started to say, then stopped, his gaze riveted on the small mirror in his hand. Instead of reflecting himself, and the room behind him, it showed a dark chamber he recognized, and another’s face that he knew very well indeed. “Sabra!”
“Cooper, thank the Fates that you and your friends made it in time,” the voice of the one-time Magus Prime of Earth came clearly from the scrying mirror. He’d last spoken to her over a year ago, when she’d reluctantly left Earth to take up her responsibilities as the new ruler of the Dark World, and he was glad to see that the job appeared to be agreeing with her – she sounded stronger, more sure of herself, than he’d ever known her to be before. “I knew it was the right move, helping Devaj shift the Sanctum closer to you. How is he? I know one of the Brotherhood managed to bite him, though he tried to downplay it.”
“Of course he did,” Totem said with a laugh. “He was probably afraid you’d come back to try and save him, and he’d never want to be responsible for all the lives that action would cost in the Dark World.”
“You’re right, of course… and while things are going better here than I’d first feared, I’m still very much bringing all the mystical threads of this amalgamated world under my control. It will be years yet, I think, before I can safely leave it for any significant length of time. Which brings us to the current problem – I can’t return right now, not even to secure the Sanctum Primus; but I refuse to let it be looted or, worse yet, fall into evil hands. The Guardian is not on Earth at the moment, so I’m afraid this job falls to you alone, my friend. You and the Vanguard, if they’re willing.”
“Of course we are, Sabra,” Artemis assured her, stepping up beside Totem to peer into the mirror. “We are no more anxious to see a nexus of such power fall into the wrong hands than you are. What can you tell us about what we’re facing? We saw video footage of a several people entering before the Brood goons… were there any others before them, when the Sanctum was still in New Atlantis?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t be entirely sure, Artemis. My connection to the Sanctum isn’t that strong any more. I can sense…” she paused a moment, clearing concentrating “…an ancient undead presence… and someone trapped within a powerful curse.” Sabra’s frown deepened. “There’s something else, wound through them all… something strange and very powerful, yet so diffuse I can’t get a handle on it at all.” She shook her head as if to clear it, and looked once more straight out of the mirror.
“But I know exactly who it was who actually broke the wards… which were weakening, yes, but were still fully in place. It was Medea! She’s after something powerful, I fear. If she’s smart—and let’s be honest, she’s not stupid, no matter how sick and twisted she is otherwise —she’s after the Atlas of Eternity. I suspect, whatever that unnatural thread of power I’m sensing really is, that is what provided Medea the keys to the castle.”
“Medea?” Quanta asked in disbelief. “Like from the Greek myths?”
“Yes,” Sabra said , either missing or simply ignoring his tone. “She’s a demigod sorceress, the same one who killed her own kids just to drive her cheating husband mad three thousand years ago. She hasn’t improved any since then, I assure you.
“She’s never been Magus-Prime-level in terms of raw power, and she’s been laying relatively low the last few decades, I know. She’s always been more of a trickster — a parasite who relies on others’ strength to get what she wants. But with the treasures the Atlas of Eternity could lead her to… well, she could stand on her own then. Maybe even take the title of Magus Prime, if she were lucky enough, and wise in her choices. And that would be a disaster for Earth!”
“What exactly is this Atlas of Eternity?” Scion asked.
“The Atlas… well, that’s a crazy story. It’s… sort of map to all the secret doors between worlds and to the treasures hidden in the cracks of creation. If you want to master space, or find some terrible lost artifact, or recover a hidden bauble? The Atlas of Eternity will guide you to where you need to be to achieve your goal. A clever person could cause a lot of trouble with it, which is why it’s been locked in the Sanctum since Merlin was the Magus Prime.”
“Can you you guide us to Medea, or at least to where the Atlas is?” Totem asked. “I have no idea where to find it, I’m just not that familiar with the Sanctum… Artemis, you’ve been here before, do you…?”
“Not a clue,” his teammate shook her head. “I don’t even recognize this part of the house, and I know it changes over time.”
“Yes, the Sanctum Primus is a space outside of space,” Sabra said. “It’s built across the intersections of reality. It’s… it’s so much larger than it looks, and the rooms do drift a bit, even at the best of times, if you don’t know where you’re going. Without a Magus Prime to guide its form, it’s only gotten worse. But if you can keep focused on where you need to be, or on what you need to find, it should give you the path to get there – the house isn’t exactly sentient, but it does have an intelligence of sorts, one that is geared toward helpfulness. Even so things might still get a little… weird?”
“Just don’t go looking for trouble, because the house will very likely provide it. And be wary. There might still be things trapped inside there, beyond the current trespassers; things which might have been released by this invasion. And if you use up the toilet paper, replace it. Devaj will really chew you out if he comes to and finds out there’s no toilet paper.
“Listen, I have to go for now… the time differential between our dimensions is particularly large right now, and it’s a strain to keep the connection open. But keep the Cheval Eye — the hand mirror we’re talking through. If you get truly lost or really need my knowledge of the Sanctum, use it to contact me. For every hour on Earth, about five are passing here just now… which reminds me, keep in mind that, within the Sanctum itself, 13 hours pass for every 12 in the outside world.”
After a few more words of assurance that they were on the job, Sabra’s image faded from the glass, and it became an ordinary-looking mirror once more. Leaving Devaj as comfortable as possible, the heroes returned to the foyer and considered their options. Aside from the two parlors to either side, and the rooms beyond them, two corridors led to either wing of the house, and double doors beyond the statue, where Devaj’s blood was slowly drying, led back into the depths of the mansion.
“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Artemis said after a moment, “but I’m getting the strong sense that we should proceed straight back, through those doors.” There were murmurs of agreement, and she led the way, pushing open the heavy oak doors and stepping into the wide, dark wood-paneled corridor beyond. Doors appeared at intervals as they paced the hallway, but no one felt any compulsion to open them, and the corridor began to slowly curve to the right. About the time Quanta estimated they should be about in the living room of a house two blocks northeast of them (or maybe the kitchen), they reaced another set of wide double doors, these with panels of thick etched glass inset in the upper halves. The room beyond seemed brightly lit…
“The Great Libray,” Totem said as he swung the doors open and led the way in. “I’ve been here before, more than once… although I do remember it looking a little different…”
Whatever it might have looked like previously, at the moment it was an immense two level chamber at least 100 feet long and 40 feet wide. The upper level was a wide mezzanine around the walls, reached by twin sets of curving stairs at the far end, and above that an immense frosted glass ceiling let in a gray, diffuse daylight… which Quanta found puzzling, as he was certain they’d not climbed any stairs, and that the house was at least three stories tall… well, inter-dimensional tesseract space was hardly unheard of, and was certainly no proof of any so-called “magic.” Quite the opposite, actually…
Every wall, from floor to the high ceiling, was lined with shelves, and those shelves were filled with books of every size and description, as well as scrolls, tablets, folios and other unrecognizable forms of compiled written knowledge. Chairs and reading tables were scattered about the open central space, to either side of a wide aisle of bookshelves running down the center of the room. Littered with books, magazines, games, puzzles, and maps, they invited the passerby to pause and relax, just for a moment, with whatever they might find diverting…
And as diverting and fascinating as the room promised to be, everyone felt the press of urgency to find and stop the various invaders who had breached the Sanctum. They passed through the vast space to the far doors, and stepped out into a corridor almost identical to the one they’d entered from. Several more minutes of brisk walking down winding corridors brought them to a new set of double doors — which opened into the Great Library.
It quickly became obvious that they were stuck, at least for the moment. Totem sensed a certain loneliness in the chamber, and an eagerness to please. “I think the Sanctum may believe there is something for us to learn here, related to our goals… I sense no malice, only a desire to help… and maybe a little loneliness. I suggest that we just see what the Library may be trying to show us… and remember what Sabra said – focus on our goals, don’t get distracted.”
Seeing no other viable options, since the others seemed adamant about not trying to blast holes through the walls – “that would be incredible dangerous,” Totem had assured him, “and almost certainly useless” – Quanta had given in with ill grace and began wandering the aisles, glancing at book titles. Every now and then, out of the corner of his eye, he would catch a glimpse of someone. But whenever he turned toward the figure or figures, they turned translucent and quickly faded away. The most disturbing of these was a blond-haired tyke, of maybe eight, dressed like a child from the turn of the Twentieth Century, including short pants, Buster Brown shoes, and a large bow-tie, crouched behind a large stack of books on the floor, staring at him. As the apparition faded away Quanta thought the kid had been looking back at him, and had seemed startled…
As he wandered the library he noticed that books seemed to slide out on the shelves as he passed, just a little, so subtlety that it was hard to be sure… and books laid out on tables would have some errant breeze (from where, he wondered, annoyed) flutter their pages… and when he bothered to look, the book or the chapter was always about something he was interested in… chemistry, physics, quantum mechanics, fencing… but he resolutely refused to be tempted.
Until he caught a glimpse of a treatise that seemed to reference treating cancer with kundalini crystals. His mind was still partially on his recent healing of the old caretaker of this place, and the insights he’d gleaned watching Totem’s power at work on the quantum level. This slim volume seemed to dovetail perfectly into those thoughts… he was hardly aware of pulling up a chair as he began reading. His previous intransigence was forgotten as the ideas he’d only dimly begun to form began to coalesce in his mind…
Artemis, wandering through a different section of the Library, was also catching occasional glimpses of strange, apparition-like figures. She recognized a young Roland Reid, as she’d known him in the Fifties, playing chess with the now long-dead New York crook called the Sandman, also looking much younger. She smiled as the vision faded… she’d suspected at the time that the two “arch-enemies”might have had something more going on, in the period before Roland met Devaj… her smile faded as she noticed a splotch of ink on a nearby reading table. A shiny, fresh, and wet splotch of ink.
She turned her full focus on examining the table and its contents. A loose sheaf of note paper lay to one side, near an inkwell and an antique fountain pen. It was from the latter that the spilled ink had come, and quite recently, since such ink dried fairly quickly. She began to examine the books stacked nearby on the table, and in moments she was completely engrossed. Several proved to be the professional journals of Arkanos, Roland’s public heroic identity; others were catalogs of various powerful artifacts he had gathered over the years, and ledgers wherein he described the experiments he had performed on many of those artifacts.
Skimming the journals, Artemis learned that, in his later years, the Magus Prime had feared a powerful spellcaster would attempt to wrest control of Earth’s magic away from his chosen successor if he died before Sabra was powerful enough to successfully defend her title. To forestall such an eventuality, over the last several years of his life Roland had created several magical talismans—the Arcane Wards as he’d called them —from existing artifacts in his collection and dispersed them around them world, where he believed they would prevent any malevolent infiltration of the planet’s magical aura.
And now it seemed that the Vanguard had interrupted someone researching the wards, their power, indeed the very fact of their existence. She wondered how much they had learned before being interrupted. Could it have been Medea herself? That might explain her hunger for the Atlas… although even on its own that tome could prove all too dangerous in her hands.
Or maybe it was one of the other intruders currently in the Sanctum… she had a sinking suspicion, for instance, about who the “powerful undead” intruder might be, and if she was right he was at least as dangerous as Medea. She hoped she was wrong, she had no desire to see him again…
Totem took a more methodical approach to the Library, choosing to go through the massive old-fashioned card catalogue that filled one wall of the room’s antechamber. It was not entirely clear to him how it was organized – it certainly wasn’t the Dewey Decimal system he’d learned in recent years at ACU – but the longer he studied it, the more he began to see its patterns, and he could sense the logic of it hovering just beyond his grasp…
As he turned to pull open another card drawer several feet away a motion caught his eye, arresting his attention. On the other side of the antechamber was a small reading table and two comfortable wing chairs, arranged beneath a beautiful Tiffany stained-glass floor lamp. In one of the chairs he saw a semi-translucent vision of himself — older, if the gray at his temples were any indication — sitting and reading from a large, leather bound book. The phantom Cooper was dressed in a simple tunic and trousers, both decorated at cuffs and seams with Haida images in colorful embroidery, and a cape he recognized as Arkanos’ old Cape of Levitation was draped over the back of the chair. His mirage-self looked up from his reading and a smile lit his face as another figure approached, carrying a tray with teapot and cups… before he could make out who the newcomer was, beyond a sense of femaleness, the vision vanished, gone like a soap bubble…
Scion, on the mezzanine level of the Great Library, had found his attention quickly riveted by a particularly aged volume, written in ancient Atlantean. He spoke, and read, the modern version of the language, but it was a very conservative tongue and he found himself able to make out much of what the text was saying. It seemed to be a history of the powerful Atlantean metal orichalcum, and included details on its making that he’d been told were long lost, even to today’s mage-scientists of the undersea realm. He’d used the metal as an alloy in the nanobots that comprised his armor, but he’d always been limited by the amount available to him. If he could learn to forge his own supply, though, the possibilities for improving his armor… scenarios began multiplying in his mind as he read…
For a moment his attention was pulled form the book by the spectral vision of a massive brute of a man pushing a book cart past him, pulling books from it and re-shelving them as he went. Although the man’s features were blunt and brutal-looking, the expression on his face seemed relaxed and content, perhaps even happy. He was dressed in slacks, shirt and a sports jacket, but even as Scion wondered where he could’ve found clothes (not to mention the shoes) to fit him, the vision faded away. With a bemused shrug, Scion turned back to his book and the effort to decipher precisely what elements went into the forging of orichalcum…
Both the Blue Flame and Chilz had little trouble resisting the enticements of the Library, instead pulling out books of similar size to line up on a particularly long reading table in the center of the room, spaced a few inches apart to form a winding chain. Once they had them in place, Chilz tapped the first one and the two heroes watched in delight as the domino effect rippled around the table with a steady whump-whump-whump of falling books. As they were gathering the volumes up to try an new arrangement, however, Chilz’ attention was caught by the cover of a collection of stories about the Norse frost giants… it was a lush illustration of a massive crystalline figure that looked very similar to himself, if bluish rather than greenish, towering over the flame-haired and grinning god of mischief, Loki… which figure also looked vaguely familiar, somehow. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why, though…
While his friend began flipping though the book on Norse mythology, Jonny was distracted by what he could swear were two Jurassic Park velociraptors (well, Deinonychus, actually – the movie had gotten that bit wrong, he knew) stalking the aisles to their left. But when he tried to flame up to go investigate, he found he simply… couldn’t. The trigger was there, but it was like it was under a thick plastic shield – he could “see” it, but he couldn’t touch the switch to flip it… frustrated, he had the distinct impression that it was the Library itself that did NOT want a man of incendiary plasma lighting up within its confines… its very flammable confines. Speaking of which, was that a copy of next week’s People magazine on that chair? He picked it up and began to leaf through it, amazed at how beyond up-to-date this library was… too bad People didn’t print Lottery results, he could get rich quick, if they did…
As each of the six heroes became engrossed in their chosen reading material, they slipped gradually into a strange, trance-like state. Each remained fully aware of where they were, but they also seemed to be somewhere else entirely. Quanta saw himself in a lab, one he recognized as his personal lab at his family estate in upstate New York. He was manipulating a series of crystals (he knew with certainty that they were kundalini matrix crystals) and was trying to form a gateway. An attempt to extend his quantum tunneling effect, maybe? As he watched a shimmering circle appeared in midair and began to grow… and a massive tentacle, terrifying, slimy, and a glabberous green and yellow, began snaking through it…
Artemis found herself in a forest, or more accurately a temperate rainforest, the massive boles of giant sequoias and redwoods around her, the gray light of late afternoon filtering through the thick green canopy overhead. She was confronting a man she recognized instantly, although she had never yet met him in person, beyond a glimpse on a crowded Manila street over a century past — her father. There was no mistaking that face, those green eyes so like her own, or the red hair. She seemed angry, but he looked amused, and seemed to be trying to placate her…
Totem found himself in a familiar glade, a spot just outside the village where he’d grown to manhood. Through the trees he could see the village itself, and he ran eagerly forward… only to be brought up short in horror. The long houses were all smoldering ruins, not a single one still standing whole. All about the central open area were the hacked and mutilated corpses of his people, so many faces he recognized even in their death agonies…
Scion, wearing what he knew was his own armor, despite it looking considerably different, floated in the dark ocean over the shattered remnants of an Atlantean city. It was not a place he recognized, beyond the style of architecture, certainly not Great Atlantis itself, but it was clearly more than a mere outpost. As he watched, people were streaming up from the broken buildings — clearly refugees fleeing their homes. They swam past him, careful to keep their distance, and more than a few cast glances at him that ranged from fearful to enraged, while mothers shifted their children to shield them from his gaze…
The Blue Flame saw a clearly older version of himself… perhaps in his mid-thirties, it was hard to be sure. This older self was in human form, wearing an expensive-looking suit, and standing over an open casket. He gazed down in obvious grief, although the body within was obscured from his younger self’s view. Arranged behind Older Jonny were a dozen or more hard looking men, all Japanese and dressed in black, like their boss… like ninjas, actually…
Chilz found himself on the roof of the Empire Tower Hotel in uptown Astoria, overlooking a city covered in a massive blanket of snow… no, not snow — ice! And that ice was rising as he watched, engulfing whole buildings, its growth fueled by a 1,000-foot tall ice giant. A giant that was himself he realized, with a thrill of horror, grown to monstrous size and power! The giant Chilz laughed as he drowned the city in ice, a cold, harsh laugh without a trace of warmth or life in it…
One by one the Vanguard either embraced or shook off their visions, gradually coming back to the here-and-now, although the memory of what they’d seen remained clear in their minds. No one chose to speak of what they’d seen to the others, and as they gathered back at the center of the Great Library it was with subdued demeanors.
“Well, I think I’ve learned what I needed to here,” Totem said, breaking the contemplative silence as soon as Blue Flame and Chilz joined the group. “Hopefully we’ve all gained something from the experience. I think we should find that we’re able to continue on beyond the Library now. But let me re-emphasize what Sabra told us: the Sanctum reacts to our thoughts and desires. This goes beyond just guiding us, though — if you can focus your will strongly enough, you can change the very substance of this place. That is, make a room larger, or smaller; change the environment; or rearrange the elements within it.”
Totem’s understanding was quickly proved correct, as the team once again exited the Great Library through the far doors. This time they found themselves in a hallway that did not return them back to the Library. Determined to find the intruders they knew must be ahead of them, they quickly passed through a series of hallways and chambers. They poked their heads into various guest quarters, modest in size but sumptuously decorated, featuring ornate chairs, executive writing desks, lavish beds, and anything else needed to make guests comfortable.
They didn’t linger in the Hall of Champions, an expansive area displaying portraits, busts, and monuments celebrating the Magus’ Prime of earlier eras, such as Contessa Viola Girabaldi and Shilah Atsa, alongside their allies, from Arthurian knights to the Liberty Alliance. Great deeds were recreated through artistic displays, along with replicas of the power-objects used by these worthies in their victories. “No, none of these artifacts are the real thing,” Totem assured an excited Blue Flame when he suggested they arm themselves with magic weapons. “Everything in here are just recreations, I promise.”
Beyond the Hall of Champions lay the Hall of Infamy. Within its wide halls were depicted the most dire threats faced by Magus’ Prime throughout the ages; glowering statues, broken fragments of once-fearsome weapons and armor, weathered records of the evil machinations of powerful foes such as Lilith, Dolórüska, and Varina.
Stumbling across the Pantry, they took a moment to refresh themselves, at Totem’s suggestion. Although modest in size, it was stocked with an incredible array of satisfying refreshments, which the shaman assured his companions would banish fatigue and restore energy. “It also restocks itself as needed, so take what you wish… we may need every edge we can get soon.”
A short time later the group reached what Totem said was the Sanctum’s Artifact Museum. “This is where the real stuff is, Blue Flame,” he said quietly. “It’s the place Roland stored many of his less-volatile artifacts and trophies, the ones that didn’t represent world-ending threats. Those he kept in individual vaults, down in the deep cellars.”
He spoke sotto voce because the heavy set of double doors they faced, down a long hallway, stood wide open, their locks smashed to flinders. The vast room beyond the doors was circular in shape, with alcoves lining the wall and a series of concentric pillars upholding a high, domed ceiling that mimicked the evening sky. Each of the alcoves held a single artifact, illuminated by a hidden light source, ranging from clearly ancient helmets and other bits of armor, to an original 1984 iMac. The rest of the floor space was covered in display cases of varying sizes and shapes, each warded by runes of power and magical locks. The cases contained scores of other artifacts, from weapons like obsidian swords to books bound in demon-hide, and strange instruments of patina-tinged copper to a battered golden helmet worn by an ancient warrior-king.
A quarter of the way around the outer wall from the doors they could see an intruder. Armored in a dark navy-blue exosuit, they had just smashed a small display case, lifting out a 10” stone statuette as the Vanguard entered the Museum. The figure’s grotesque, manta-like head, with huge glowing lenses for eyes, turned just as Artemis hurled her two electrified shadow sticks at it. Moving surprisingly fast for its bulk, the thief twisted away from the first stick, but was struck in the side by the second one.
Damn, Artemis thought as the sticks dissolved again into shadow and flowed back to her, the suit must be insulated.
Quanta had been going to launch his own attack on the strangely armored figure, but he’d caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure flitting from pillar to pillar on the other side fo the chamber, and he aimed a stream of fast-moving bucky balls at where he calculated it would next be exposed. The silvery blast caught the figure full in the chest, sending it flying backward into a large stone sarcophagus-like exhibit with a muffled curse.
As the figure quickly pulled itself back to its feet, Quanta could see that it was a man, moderately tall, dressed in dark trousers, a brilliant white shirt with puffy sleeves pulled tight at the wrists, and a black and red waistcoat, with dark hair and even darker eyes… he found his gaze arrested by those eyes… so dark, so deep… and in the depths was growing a terrible red light… Kyle felt himself falling into those dark, crimson depths… as he fell, he sensed another will, powerful and commanding reaching out for him… he struggled, briefly, but the other mind pinned him like a butterfly to a board… it overrode his own will, and suddenly he was a passenger in his own body…
“My TacComp says the armored intruder is one Carl Mattus,” Scion called out over the comms, “a mercenary who goes by the nom de crime of Blue Manta. He’s wearing an experimental armor he stole two years ago. It’s meant to operate underwater at tremendous depths and pressures, which makes him pretty tough.”
“Yes, he seems immune to electrical attacks,” Artemis confirmed. “But the real threat here is the other intruder. I recognize him — it’s Vlad Dracul, the vampire lord better known as Dracula. He is extremely dangerous, and whatever you do not meet his gaze – his ability to control other minds is very powerful! I don’t recognize the spear he’s holding, but I assume it’s what he was after here in the Sanctum…”
Realizing they might need every advantage in this fight, Totem took a moment to organize his thoughts, and concentrated on what he wanted. He understood the Sanctum well enough to know how it responded to a strong mind and focused will… as he imagined it, so the room began to adapt to his vision… when he opened his eyes, the various display cases were now arrayed in a semi-circle between the heroes and their two foes, who suddenly found themselves relocated to the center of the rotunda.
As soon as he’d heard Artemis’ words, the Blue Flame had let his human form fade away, slipping into his plasma form. His costume changed with him, of course, being made of Q-Lon 7, but Scion and Quanta hadn’t yet figured out a way to let him wear a comm-link — the device vaporized into its component atoms. He shot upward to hover near the domed ceiling and yelled out “radishes” before letting loose a dazzling burst of blue-white light. The code word meant his teammates looked away in time to avoid the blinding flash, but their enemies’ eyes were drawn toward him…
Dracula threw his arms up to shield himself from the sudden light, but quickly realized that, however bright, the light was not sunlight and therefore of no consequence to him. The look on his face, however, at having been made to react, however briefly… if the Blue Flame had possessed blood, it would’ve run cold then. He was very glad he was made of plasma just now, and therefore not likely to be a viable target for the blood-sucker. He was also disappointed, if not surprised, that Blue Manta was unaffected by his flash – he’d learned long ago that armored foes were seldom vulnerable to that particular tactic…
Scion, taking to the air himself, decided it would be best to take out the merely human opponent first, if possible, so that they could concentrate as a team on the much more formidable vampire lord. He focused his Brain Tickler on the armored villain, but even as he released the EM burst into Blue Manta’s head, staggering him, Scion was ordering his own armor to begin reconfiguring his chest emitter’s optical frequencies… Blue Flame’s attempt had given him an idea…
Chilz, after recovering from the initial shock at the idea that they were actually facing Dracula himself (and that Dracula was actually real), quickly moved to form a massive ice cage around the two bad guys in the center of the room. An already dazed Blue Manta found himself surrounded by thick bars of greenish ice, but Dracula moved with shocking speed, for an instant almost a blur, and avoided the trap.
“I see you survived the Van Helsing Institute’s most recent attempt to eradicate you, Vlad,” Artemis said, as she leaped forward to attack, delivering a series of rapid punches to several key nerve junctions that, even in an animated corpse, could cripple. The vampire grunted and staggered back several steps, but he seemed to sense her true goal, and managed to keep his spear out of her grasp.
“Indeed, my dear Artemis,” Dracula said, his voice deep, sensual, and as disturbing to her as ever. “And you don’t look a day older than when last we met… I can see now why my blandishments of eternal youth never swayed you.”
Something in his eyes warned her just in time, and she threw herself aside barely in time to avoid a blast of Quanta’s silvery quantum matter that blew chips out of the marble floor where she’d been crouched. Damn, Vlad must have caught his gaze almost as soon as they’d come in…
But she had no time to worry about her teammate just then, for Dracula had moved as quickly as she, lunging in with the wicked spear he wielded. She’d almost forgotten how fast he could move, and she didn’t quite evade the blow – the spear sliced through the tough fabric of her costume and into the flesh of her left side. Blood spattered as she rolled away, gasping in pain, and she saw the amused, almost bored expression on his face vanish, replaced by one of sudden, overwhelming lust. But it wasn’t the sexual lust they had once shared, however briefly… this was the darker, inhuman lust that had ultimately driven them apart – the blood lust.
Before Dracula could move in to take advantage of her momentary weakness, he found himself surrounded by glowing bands of mystic azure energy. His spear slashed down and through the streamers as they attempted to contract about him, dissipating them into vapor. He turned to see where… ah, there, one of Artemis’ allies, the New World savage.
Obviously a mage of some skill, the vampire lord realized as new azure bonds quickly formed and constricted tightly around him, pinning his arms and leaving Slake unusable for the moment. But he didn’t need the weapon to break these childish bonds… he drew a deep, unnecessary breath, then gave a powerful shrug as he released the power of his own formidable will. The glowing bands shredded like mist in a high wind.
Blue Flame had seen Quanta attack Artemis, and for an instant he’d been shocked into paralysis. Then he’d realized that it must be Dracula’s doing, Artemis had just warned them about his power to control other minds. His dazzling burst might not have any effect on the undead or the armored, but if he didn’t yell the code word… hoping everyone else was looking away, he called Quanta’s name…
Quanta suddenly felt the dark grip holding his will, like he might hold a dog by the scruff, break as a blinding blue light flared in his mind. Shaking his head, he found himself back in control of his own body, even if with half-blinded eyes… from the Blue Flame he realized, and gave his hovering teammate a quick thumbs up. He owed the kid a beer. Damn, if only he could see what the hell was going on around him, he’d flatten that damn vampire in a second…
Scion had little hope that his Brain Tickler would work any better on Dracula than it had on the undead magician Abracadaver, but he needed to keep the creature distracted while Artemis recovered. The wound hadn’t looked mortal, and he knew she healed astonishingly quickly. As expected, the EM blast did nothing but annoy the vampire lord.
It did manage to distract him enough, however, for Chilz to grab the undead bastard from behind and attempt to pin him. But Dracula slid through his arms like the proverbial greased pig, and even as the vampire spun on one foot to deliver a powerful roundhouse kick to Chilz’ stomach he also reached out with his spear, scoring its sharp metal edge along the bars of the ice prison holding Blue Manta.
Chilz focused his own will and sent a blast of polar-vortex-strength cold at Dracula, who just laughed. “Did you really think cold could harm a lord of the undead, you icy imbecile?” he mocked. “I assure you, the cold of the grave is deeper and more enervating than anything you could ever produce.”
In his anger Chilz forgot Artemis’ warning, and he locked gazes with the Lord of Vampires. As he stared into the dark pits of Dracula’s eyes Chuck felt a cold unlike anything he’d ever experienced before… the chill of the grave, he realized. He felt the vampire’s will rising like a dark tide, threatening to overwhelm him… to seize control and turn him against his friends… with a supreme effort Chuck gathered every once of his will and resolve and roared a mental “NO!”
The psychic connection between the two snapped like a frozen wire, and Dracula actually fell back a step in surprise. Before either could renew the battle, however, Blue Manta blasted apart the ice cage that had held him, stepping out and raising the strange idol he held…
Only his powerful armor prevented him from being crushed flat by the ton of solid matter that suddenly materialized over his head. Dracula had again moved at blinding speed to avoid being crushed by the falling mass of Quanta’s attack, and to distance himself from the ice giant.
Artemis checked her side as she crouched down behind a still-intact display case. The bleeding had stopped, of course, and the wound itself was closing. Only a thin red line marked where her flesh had been opened, and that would be gone in another minute. It was time to find something she could use against Vlad; she knew from experience that her shadow abilities alone weren’t going to cut it.
“Artemis, I think you’re the one best qualified to use this,” Totem whispered as he dropped to a knee near her, crowding the scant cover the case provided. In his hand was a long, thin spine of twisted dark metal, its center wrapped in red leather. “According to the placard on the case I took this from, it’s the Lance of Van Helsing, and can incapacitate a vampire just as effectively as an ash stake – just make sure one of the pointy ends goes into him.”
“Yes, thank you, I’m aware of the process. Actually this is just what I was looking for—” Artemis had just taken the javelin from Totem when a dazed and desperate Blue Manta staggered up from the fading rubble of Quanta’s last attack. He held the stolen idol up over his head and mumbled something alien-sounding — a wave of mind-rending terror washed over everyone in line-of-sight of the hideous object.
Totem had been looking at Artemis, and so was unaffected; but she had been looking directly at the armored felon when he unleashed the idol’s power – Totem saw her eyes roll up into her head and barely had time to break her fall as she collapsed, pale, twitching and completely out of it.
Scion, hovering between Dracula and Blue Manta had also looked toward the latter when he called out, but while he felt the wave of horror wash over him, it was attenuated and mostly ineffectual. He was momentarily chilled, but he suspected the properties of his orichalcum alloy armor had protected him from the brunt of the psychic attack.
Both Blue Flame and Quanta were farther away, but unshielded, and they felt a stronger effect of the dark emotional wave. They were momentarily frozen in place, riveted by the terror and horror of their greatest fears suddenly overwhelming their minds. Chilz, his full attention locked on Dracula, hadn’t even heard Blue Manta speak, and so, like Totem, had avoided the attack altogether.
Dracula, unaffected by the spell himself, naturally, seized the heroes’ momentary distraction to grab a large stone head, something Olmec-looking he rather thought, and hurl it up at the armored human, scoring a direct hit. As soon as he’d released the stone, Dracula turned his attention to the next threat, the New World savage standing between him and the fallen Artemis.
Locking eyes with the shaman, he sent the full force of his will out to seize the mortal’s mind. With a mage under his control he could end this battle quickly— the vampire reeled back, as stunned as if he’d struck a wall of stone, and Slake slipped from his grip to clatter to the stones at his feet.
The human had repelled him, utterly! How was such a thing possible?! Ah, he saw it then, a slim circlet of silver on the man’s brow. He recognized it from centuries past, an amulet of some power, designed to shield its wearer from almost any form of possession or mental control. The Sisterhood of Morgana had once used it against him, to annoying effect, back in the 17th Century, he recalled; the Magus Prime must have been housing it in this museum of his, and the lucky fool had stumbled upon it amongst the wreckage.
And if he had found that, no telling what else might be laying about to hand for these insipid do-gooders to pick up and use against him. As much as he lusted to again taste the bewitching Artemis’ blood, it was time to quit this place. He’d got what he’d come for… this on-going contretemps was now mere vanity on his part. With Slake in his possession once more, he would be free to walk the sunlit world again, in all his vampiric power. He stepped forward, toward the fallen spear… and screamed as the sun bloomed suddenly above him.
Scion had nearly been knocked out of the air by the large stone head Dracula had hurled at him, but had somehow managed to right himself, and even managed to hold onto the artifact long enough to set it down again, relatively undamaged. No telling how valuable it was, but if it was here, he assumed it must be important. As he took to the air again his internal computer pinged – the alterations to the main emitter were complete!
Looking around, he saw that the vampire lord had somehow lost the great spear he’d been carrying throughout the fight. Scion had no idea what powers the weapon might have, but if Dracula had broken into this place to obtain it, it was probably best he not be allowed to re-acquire it. With a flick of an eye he triggered his chest emitter, and a wide spectrum flare of pure sunlight flooded the room, the pillars casting dark shadows away from him in all directions.
Several things happened at once, then. Dracula screamed in pain, and only his preternatural speed allowed him to take shelter in the shadow of one of the rooms large pillars before he burst entirely into flame… but without his spear. At the same time the Blue Flame, recovered from his momentary bout of terror, had unleashed a barrage of plasma bolts at Blue Manta. The flames didn’t seem to faze the villain overmuch, but they did manage to knock the stone idol from his hand, sending it spinning away across the marble floor. The man’s scream of anguish had been almost as unnerving as Dracula’s.
Chilz, who had taken to heart Totem’s lesson on how the Sanctum would respond to a strong will, had been concentrating, having an idea similar to Scions. Now he unleashed his gathered will, and the domed ceiling of the Museum became suddenly transparent. Unfortunately, there was no sun shining through… only a roiling void of violet light.
Well damn! But Chilz had no time to dwell on his disappointment, as he saw his friend knock the stone statue from Blue Manta’s hand. The armored mercenary was scrambling after it, clearly desperate to recover his lost toy. I don’t think so pal… suddenly, hailstones the size of large marbles filled the air over the villain to rain down on him in almost deafening cacophony of ice on metal and stone.
The hail did nothing much in the way of damage, given all that armor, but it did quickly cover the floor for several yards around, turning it into a slick, treacherous surface. Blue Manta slipped, fell hard, scrambled to regain his footing, almost made it, only to slam into the floor once more. Then he was scrambling, crab-like, on hands and knees… he almost reached the idol, but his gloved hand hit it and it shot away at a 45° angle… he cursed and scrambled after it…
Above it all, Scion was focused on moving his sunlight emitter to deny Dracula any shadow to hide in, and the vampire was moving desperately to keep the pillar between himself and the deadly light… and to position himself to retrieve the spear he’d been forced to abandon, Scion saw.
He also saw what the Lord of Vampires, in his pain, fear and desperate calculation failed to see – Artemis, rising like a living wraith from the very shadow in which he hid, a long javelin in her hand. At the last instant some uncanny instinct must have warned him, for Dracula turned — but too late. With all her considerable strength Artemis drove the Lance of Van Helsing into his chest and out his back. With a strangled gasp the vampire’s whole body seemed gripped in a terrible rictus, and then he went limp, collapsing to the cold marble floor, unmoving, even more dead than usual.
As Dracula fell, Quanta, Totem and the Blue Flame were all attempting to grapple with and subdue Blue Manta, who scrambled almost mindlessly after his lost artifact. But the hail-slicked floor left them at almost as much a disadvantage as their foe. The icy surface was no hinderance to Chilz, however, who strode forward, grabbed the mercenary by the armored hoses at the back of his helmet and hauled him up… to deliver a roundhouse punch that cracked the ceramic-metal eye-lenses of the faceplate and left the villain limp in his grip.
“We need to deal with Dracula,” Artemis said to Scion and Totem. “Quanta, you three get Blue Manta out of that armor and restrained as quickly as possible. ”
“Wait, isn’t the vampire dead?” the Blue Flame asked, reverting to his human form. “What’s to deal with?”
“He is merely incapacitated,” Artemis said over her shoulder as she and the others strode away. “That spear can take even Dracula down, true, but once it’s removed he’ll reanimate all too quickly. Fortunately, I see something we can use to prevent that …”
While she, Scion and Totem lifted the ancient vampire and lowered him into the mystical sarcophagus that would hold him as long as its seals remained unbroken, careful not to dislodge the Lance of Van Helsing which impaled him, the others began pulling apart the armor from a groggy but slowly reviving Carl Mattus.
“No, please,” the man gasped as he regained enough awareness to realize what was happening. “You have to let me have that idol, for God’s sake! Please, it’s the only thing that can stop my transformation… and with the right help, break this curse completely… please…”
Quanta paused as he pulled the shattered helmet off their captive and got a good look at the man’s face. His gray eyes were disturbingly large and bulged grotesquely, his skin was slightly translucent, with a tinge of green and just a hint of scales, and his mouth was unnervingly wide. Only his lank, dirty blond hair looked relatively normal. In fact, the man looked uncannily like many of the residents of small Massachusetts costal town Kyle had once met during his time at MIT.
“Are you from Massachusetts, by any chance?” he asked as Chilz pulled apart the chest and back panels of the armor, and Blue Flame tugged off the first of the boots.
“What? No, I’m from Van Nuys… please, listen! You have to believe me, I didn’t look anything like this four months ago… and it’s getting worse! Look, check out my wallet, it’s in a compartment in the chest piece…”
Chilz laughed as he felt around and pulled out a ratty leather wallet. “You carry your ID with you when you’re out committing super-villainy?”
Sliding out the California driver’s license, he glanced at it and raised an icy eyebrow as he handed it to Quanta. The man in the picture looked very different from the one sitting hunched over on the floor before them – the picture showed a good-looking man, with blue eyes, curly golden hair, an insouciant grin, and a healthy tan. Quanta could nevertheless recognize him beneath the current distortions of his body. As they stripped the last of the stolen armor from Mattus he saw those distortions included slightly webbed fingers and even more pronounced webbing between the toes.
“OK, I can see you’ve been going through some changes,” Quanta said, crouching down in front of the prisoner. “So tell us what’s happening to you.”
“It was just after the new year, I was diving in some ruins, in the South Pacific. Treasure hunting. I’d heard there was some stuff down there that collectors would pay big bucks for, ancient stuff…”
“You went into one of the Lemurian interdiction zones?” Quanta asked. “There’s a reason the UN has sealed off those places, you know. The “treasure” there is almost always incredibly dangerous. But I guess you learned that the hard way.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Mattus said, tears welling in his enormous, distorted eyes. “Anyway, there was this ruined… temple, I guess… I eventually learned it belonged to some horrible demon-god named Dagon… anyway, I took a huge ruby from a statue there, I guess it was of this Dagon… looked sorta like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but worse… and a few weeks after I got home, I started to… change. It was little stuff at first… a skin rash, an aching jaw, like that… then the changes began to come faster… when I realized what was happening, I… I tried to reverse it… I even returned the ruby to the ruins… but I just kept changing, getting more and more like that Dagon thing…”
“So how did that lead you breaking in here?” Chilz asked, beginning to almost feel sorry for the poor mope.
“I have… contacts… I’d been doing a lot of research on this Dagon, and the Serpent People, and all that shit I used to think was bull, trying to find a cure… I read about this idol, called the Soulbinder, which was made by these dudes a long time ago, who opposed Dagon and its cult. Just holding the idol would stop the transformation — and it was working, I could feel the changes in me stop while I held it — but a real wizard-type could use it to actually reverse the damn curse! To make me human again!
“I had no idea where to find a wizard or witch or whatever, even if I could find the idol, about which I had no fuckin’ clue. But then I had this strange dream… I’ve been having a lot of strange dreams, about the ocean and these horrible… no, it doesn’t matter… this dream was different… this little kid, looked like some little Lord Fauntleroy, came to me and told me about a lady who could help me, a sorceress named Medea. He told me where to find her… well, I woke up and the memory of the dream didn’t fade, like they usually do, so I figured what the hell, what the fuck do I got to lose?
“Medea was right were the dream kid told me she’d be, and she seemed to be expecting me. That was yesterday, and today, well… you know the rest, I guess. Now please, give me back the Soulbinder… I can already feel the change beginning again… for God’s sake, please!”
“Given what you were able to do with that idol, I don’t see that happening Carl,” Artemis said. She and the others had finished sealing Dracula into his new tomb and rejoined their teammates to hear the bulk of Mattus’ tale. “But that doesn’t mean we’re going to just leave you to your fate. There are others in the world familiar with this sort of thing, and I promise we’ll do our best to help you find a cure. But for now we have more pressing issues to deal with, including your friend Medea. Any idea where she was heading?”
“No! You have to give me the idol, I swear I don’t know how I did that thing with it! Look, Medea swore that she was the only one who could fix me, please, let her try!” Mattus lunged to his feet, but Artemis was faster, and had slapped a Sleeper Pack on the back of his neck before he was halfway up. “Nooooo….” he moaned, before his eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed like a rag doll.
“OK, he’ll be out for at least six hours,” Artemis said as she bound his wrists and ankles with zip ties from her utility belt. “We’ll take his stolen armor just in case, though. Chilz, if you’ll carry it, we can stash it in another room as we continue.”
The Vanguard left the Museum by the same door they’d entered it, but now found themselves in an entirely different hallway. Unlike most of the passageways they’d traversed so far, this one was of simpler design, with white plaster walls instead of ornate wainscoting, and simple pine flooring in place of the usual elaborate parquetry. The walls were lined with mirrors on either side, mirrors of every conceivable size, shape and design. After several minutes they came across a single door, plain and utilitarian, which opened into a smallish utility closet. Chilz dropped the Blue Manta armor within, and the group continued down the hallway.
Almost too subtly to notice, the details of the mirror-lined hallway began drifting into simpler and simpler forms. Eventually only the mirrors remained, floating motionless in a white void, still forming a notional corridor about 10 feet wide. Everything else—walls, floor, ceiling—seemed entirely absent as far ahead as they could see. Turning around, Blue Flame saw the same view behind, and no hint of the hallway they’d started in.
“OK, this is freaking me out,” he said, feeling suddenly and inexplicably claustrophobic. “Where are we, and how the heck do we get outta here?”
“I think I know where we are,” Totem said slowly, examining one of the mirrors to his left. There was something a little off about his reflection, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. “Roland mentioned something like this to Sabra and I once. I think this is a sort of… backstage area of the Sanctum, a conduit of sorts. It links all of communication and scrying devices throughout the house, and across the world, even other dimensions and planes in some cases. Like this Cheval Eye, I took from Devaj.” He touched the small scrying mirror he’d tucked into his belt.
“Normally this sort of “crawl space” of the mansion would be very difficult to access, especially for visitors. But with no strong governing will for so long, I suspect things are breaking down here, just like with the exterior warding spells.”
“Great, but how do we get out of this “crawl space?” the Blue Flame repeated. “Look, if we just head in one direction, at some point we have to hit a wall, right?” Before Totem could answer he darted between two mirrors to the right and stalked off at right angles to the “corridor” formed by the mirrors. Scion moved to stop him, but Totem shook his head.
“Let him go, it will be easier than trying to explain it to him. Give it a minute.”
As his friends watched the Blue Flame grew smaller and smaller before vanishing into the whiteness of the void. A minute later they heard him swearing in frustration… from behind them. Turning, they saw their teammate walking toward them from beyond the row of mirrors on the left, looking more than a little unnerved.
“The physics, and geometry, of the mundane world don’t hold here,” Totem said, smiling as Blue Flame rejoined them. “The only way out is forward. The house isn’t actually sentient, but it is aware, and it both knows us as friends, and knows what we seek. If it let us in here, it’s for a reason, and I suspect it will eventually take us to where we need to be.”
The heroes continued to walk down the notional corridor, and as they went they began to notice that the mirrors were no longer reflecting images of themselves, exactly. Instead they showed a myriad of variations – in some mirrors the Vanguard simply wore slightly different costumes: Artemis in a blood red cloak and hood, Scion in armor of black and blue, Quanta in a variety of silvery-gray quantum shells, ranging from a medieval knight to a high-tech ninja to a cyborg.
In other mirrors there were other members on the team, sometimes adding to the roster, other times replacing one or more of the existing members; most often Phantom Ace, Prometheus, Dr. Froth and 10 appeared, but there were also variations that included several heroes from the Liberty Alliance and even a few villains, such as Sky Pirate and the Ocelot.
Yet other mirrors showed the Vanguard with altogether different powers – Chuck as a giant of orange flame or as a muscled red-headed Viking wielding a massive hammer; Jonny as a being of living electricity, or living rock, or organic metal; Totem in a variety of Avatar forms, from hummingbird to elk, and once as a woman. In that mirror all of the Vanguard were gender-swapped, in fact, to the amusement of some and the discomfort of others.
Despite the almost overwhelming temptation to linger at this or that mirror, to try and figure out what changes had led to the variations they saw, the team remained focused on their goal and didn’t stop. In time this brought them to a cul-de-sac in the mirror road. The glasses on either side, which had been growing steadily larger and more alike for several minutes, turned outward, arcing around to meet 20 feet ahead and forming a perfect circle around a wide, empty white space. Unlike the corridor mirrors, these were all of a uniform size, tall and wide, set in glittering frames of dark crystal. They also differed in showing not the Vanguard’s reflections, either actual or potential, but instead revealing images of what seemed to be whole alternate worlds and histories.
They still saw variations of themselves, often enough, but not as mere reflections of this moment – rather they saw these alternate versions in situations both familiar and alien. They saw themselves fighting on the day of the Astoria Incident, but instead of a disco ball of glittering kundalini crystals there was a cloud of silvery energy, unleashing an argent storm on a city that was almost, but not quite Astoria; they saw a world where they failed to stop Nemesis from unleashing his crystalline plague worldwide, and saw the global chaos that resulted, with millions dead and billions more with a bewildering variety of super powers set loose in a world-shattering free-for-all; a reality where they had refused to retreat through the Stargate from the capital world of the Confederated Union of Worlds, and perished in its defense, leaving their own world open to destruction; a world where the Protectorate of Counter-Earth invaded their own, leading to a prolonged war; and a dozen other histories and worlds, some hauntingly familiar, others utterly unrecognizable.
Interspersed with these scenes of larger worlds where images of corridors, many obviously within the Sanctum or variations of the Sanctum. But even the ones that seemed to look like the Sanctum they knew, on closer examination, showed minor variations of detail. Combined with the fact that the images shifted and changed from mirror to mirror with bewildering rapidity, it left the Vanguard confused and uncertain of their next move.
“I’m getting sensor readings from beyond these “frames” or whatever they are,” Scion reported. “I think these are not simply reflections of alternate possibilities, but actual dimensional portals. If we were to step through one, it’s very likely we’d end up in some other world.”
“Or where we need to be in our own,” Totem said. “The problem is figuring out which of these is our world. Scion, after our trip through the multiverse two years ago you developed a way to measure the variations in string vibrations that mark individual realities, yes? Can you scan these portals, see if you can locate the right frequency?”
“I can, sure, but they shift so quickly… by the time I can get a lock, assuming I can get a lock, on the right one there’d barely be time to make it through. And we won’t get more than two people through at a time.” Scion glanced up at Chilz and then at the mirror gates. “And Chilz will have to go through alone, in any case.”
“Fine, why don’t I make the first try then, if you can tell me when to jump,” the ice giant said. “If I make it, I’ll be like a marker as the views go ‘round – you won’t have to scan every time, just look for the corridor where I am, right?”
Agreeing that it might just work, Scion began scanning the portals. It took a few minutes, and as he worked several of the others noticed an indistinct figure, fleetingly visible among the mirrors every now and agin. They all noticed the low, almost subliminal voice murmuring “PossiBiLitieS. sO. MAnY. POssiBILiTIEs” as the figure flickered in and out of the various mirrors.
“I have no idea what that is,” Scion said, after about the fifth repetition of the phenomena. “But I’ve got a lock on the proper frequency now. Chilz, stand in front of this one, and when I give you the signal, go. It’s going to be close, my scanners just can’t get a complete reading fast enough, but I’ve compensated as much — GO!”
Chilz started at the abrupt command, then jumped forward through the mirror portal in front of him, into what looked like a familiar corridor in the Sanctum Primus. But even as leaped the image shifted… for just an instant he stood in a corridor almost, but not quite, identical to the one he knew. And then it felt like he was being turned inside out and shoved backward at the speed of light at the same time… and he was back in the white void of the Mirror Mosaic. He collapsed to his knees, clutching his spinning head and wondering what would come up if he vomited in his ice form… crushed ice?
“Sorry, Chilz,” Scion said apologetically, helping his friend back to his feet. “The timing is just so damn tricky… we missed it by a fraction of a second. Apparently there’s some sort of safeguard on these portals, though, it won’t let us stay in the “wrong” reality. Which is good, really. How are —“
A hissing voice interrupted him, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. “We. CaN. hElP. HeLp. YOu. GeT OUT. HElp uS. ExiT. As wELl.” A blurred, fractured outline of a humanoid figure stood in the nearest gate, never coming entirely into focus, constantly shifting, like an image seen in a fractured mirror or a kaleidoscope. It spoke in halting, clear tones, but with odd changes in pitch and rythym. Blue Flame thought it sounded like a verbal ransom note, each word taken from a different recording, of different people, then cut together to make sentences.
It took several minutes of back and forth with the strange creature to work out some idea of what it was and what it wanted. It seemed to call itself Glimpse, and claimed to be something called a chronozoid – a being from outside normal space-time. It had been a scientist-artist-explorer in its world — it had been hard to pin that part down with any certainty — and had been trying to understand linear time, probability and branching in linear timelines. In its attempt at understanding it had become trapped in this Mirror Mosaic… in what sounded like some sort of strange industrial accident.
They had learned all too much about linear time then, as it took it years to understand three-dimensional beings well enough to even begin to communicate with them. Eventually they were able to make contact with the Magus Prime, and Roland had helped them learn much of what they sought. They could have left then, with thier new friend’s help, but chose to stay for awhile longer, to learn more. But when Roland Reid had died unexpectedly, they had been once again trapped in the Mirror Mosaic.
Now, with their help, the entity had the chance to return to its own plane. In exchange for that help, they claimed they could guide the Vanguard back to their own branch of reality… to “thE rEal-ReAl.”
“pLucK. mIrrOr wiTh… Glimpse iN. MaRch. THrouGh aNy… pOrtaL—Glimpse gUide – hoMe.”
“Well, it’s gotta be better than going through hitting the wrong reality again,” Chilz said, once the entity’s offer was clear. “That “safeguard” of yours, Scion, hurts like a son-of-bitch… so unless you can promise you can get us through the right one, I say we take old Glimpse here up on his offer.”
There was some debate about the wisdom of freeing something held in the Sanctum Primus, even if it had a good story; but in the end everyone agreed, if the story was true, that it would be cruel to leave the being trapped. “I sense no malice in the creature,” Artemis summed it up for them all. “And if it proves to be a mistake, we’ll deal with it, as we always do. But time is wasting…”
The blurry, static-like figure of Glimpse shifted to one of the nearer mirrors back in the long corridor, and Chilz lifted it off the invisible “wall” where it hung, tucking it under his arm and stepping up to the portal/mirror they’d chosen. The strange alien proved as good as its word. The Vanguard found themselves back in what looked very much like a corridor in the Sanctum, which Scion confirmed with a scan of the vibrational frequencies.
Chilz and his passenger were the last ones through the portal, and as he stepped into the hallway the mirror under his arm shattered into sparkling powder, freeing the chronozoid instantly. The Glimpse, in the three-dimensional world, was an oddly-angled, only occasionally humanoid, silhouette composed of flickering colors, despite which it’s relief and joy were obvious.
It turned to look at its rescuers, and then waved a “limb” over the only six fragments of the shattered mirror that were larger than dust.
“uSe these. PrObaBility… sHarDs — OnCe. ShoW truTh. To seLf… ThEn show trUth. To anOtheRs.” With a final wave the entity dissolved into a swirl of light-motes before vanishing without trace.
“Huh. One for each of us,” Chilz said, picking up the six shards. As he looked at them he could see faint, translucent images flickering in each one… images of alternate realities and alternate versions of himself. He hastily handed them over to Artemis, who tucked them into a reinforced pouch at the back of her utility belt.
“I have no idea what these things do,” she said. “But now is not the time to find out. Once we’ve resolved the current crisis I think Scion and Quanta… and maybe Totem… will be the best ones to examine them and discover their purpose… and determine if they’re safe.”
No one disagreed, and after a very few minutes more of hallway walking the Vanguard found themselves standing before a pair of immense verdigris-stained bronze doors. One of them stood slightly ajar, and Artemis motioned Totem forward.
“If memory serves me, we’re at the Observatory, yes?” she whispered.
The shaman nodded. “Which is where we’re likely to find the Atlas… and Medea.”
The heroes passed cautiously and quietly through the half-opened door, to find themselves standing on a grassy, windswept hillside, under a cloudless night sky ablaze with stars. Nearby stood a large, archaic-looking stone platform, thirty feet high and 100 feet across—to all appearances an ancient open-air observatory. A stairway directly ahead looked to be the only way to the top, where stone columns formed concentric rings. While the surface of the platform wasn’t visible from this angle, a black-haired woman in Greek dress could be seen dancing high above it, the pillars of stone rising and falling to meet her feet with every step. In her hands was a large book of circular brass pages, bound in gold-embossed black leather… almost certainly the Atlas of Eternity.
“Whatever it looks like, we’re still within a room of the Sanctum,” Artemis said sotto voce before teleporting from the shadows near the entryway to a shadowed area amongst the pillars atop the Observatory. On this side the bronze doors appeared to be set in a freestanding stone arch on the hillside. The rest of the team slowly made their way forward and up the stairs, hoping to take the sorceress, and her hulking minion, by surprise.
Unfortunately her pet monster, the massive supernatural entity known as the Revenant, was sitting at the edge of a shallow reflecting pool at the center of the platform, and happened to be looking straight at the heroes as they reached the top of the stairs. He leapt to his feet with shocking speed, bellowing out a roar of challenge… and alerting his mistress.
Medea had seemed to be in a transport of joy, dancing as she was from pillar to pillar, each one changing size and position, as did the very stones of the platform, to meet her. As she danced she sang to herself and turned the pages of her new prize, devouring the information within. But Revenant’s warning snapped her out of her reverie in an instant, and she glared down at the intruders.
“Oh-ho, what’s this? Unannounced visitors in my new home? You children these days can be so rude. And you know what I do to children. But I suppose I might find it in my heart to forgive you your trespasses… if you’re here to worship me. No? Ah, well then – Revenant, be a dear and eject these heretics from your goddess’s hou—”
She was cut off suddenly as two batons of solid shadow struck her from behind, nearly knocking her from her perch a top a pillar and momentarily staggering her. She whirled in a fury to see from whence the attack had come… there, in the shadows between two pillars, a cloaked and hooded woman! With a muttered phrase in Greek, she gestured and crimson bolts of mystical energy shot out from her hands to engulf the presumptuous fool.
Artemis staggered back, feeling the arcane energies sapping her strength and clouding her mind. She fell back into shadow and teleported away, needing a moment to recover… and no point in making it easy for the ancient witch by staying in the same spot, not when there were so many shadows about…
At the same time Scion let loose on the Revenant with a stream of fully amped-up electro bolts. He’d never actually encountered the creature before, but he’d certainly heard of him. Once human, over a century earlier he had been murdered in the swamps outside New Atlantis, his body left to rot by his killers. But something had revived his corpse, if not the mind that had once animated it. Since then the dim-witted but almost infinitely strong Revenant had wandered the swampy wildernesses of the East Coast, mostly, an easily manipulated pawn of those with more brains and the will to use him.
Such attempts often didn’t end well for the would-be manipulators, but that never seemed to stop them from trying, the creature was that physically powerful. Which Scion noted now first-hand, as the pale-skinned behemoth, in his ill-fitting, rotting clothes, shrugged off his attack like it was no more than an irritating cloud of mosquitos.
Quanta took the opportunity, as the monster turned to go after Scion, to drop a block of solid quantum matter on it. The Revenant hunched its shoulders and batted it away, shattering the heavy block as if it had been made of styrofoam. Quanta realized this might be a little tougher fight than he’d first thought…
From his own spot in the shadows Totem watched Artemis’ attack and Medea’s return fire, and as the sorceress scanned the area searching for her vanished target, he cast his spell of the Sleeping Mists over her. Green flecks of glowing energy gently rained down… and Medea barely acknowledged them, simply waving them out of existence with one hand.
Chilz and Blue Flame had exchanged a few quick words as their teammates attacked, and now the latter send a plasma bolt into the pool of water the Revenant was wading through, in its attempt to reach Scion. Clouds of steam billowed up, obscuring the creature, but a bellowing roar indicated it was no more than annoyed, at best.
A dark shape flew out of the concealing mist, an enormous chunk of stone ripped from the platform. It hit Scion full in the chest, sending the armored hero tumbling backward, stunned and fighting to regain control as his systems blared alerts at him. Damn, the second time today I’ve been hit like this!
Before the Revenant itself could emerge from the cloud, however, Chilz was cooling, condensing and freezing it around the monster. In an instant the beast was flash-frozen, a dark shape barely visible in the starlight, deep within an icy prison.
With the main physical threat taken care of, at least for the moment, Scion turned his attention to Medea, sending a jolt of his Brain Zap attack into her head as she waved away Totem’s usually more effective green mist. Unfortunately his attack seemed to bother her no more than his teammate’s had.
Quanta also turned his attention to the supposed immortal sorceress, once again dropping a block of heavy matter from overhead… Medea was certainly more squish-able than that hulking brute had been. As she seemed fully aware, abandoning dignity to leap aside to another pillar, barely evading the attack, and actually dazed by a glancing blow.
Totem took advantage of her momentary distraction to cast a spell of Azure Bonds on her as she landed on the new pillar. But even distracted and bruised she shrugged off the eldrict bands, and did so with more apparent ease than had Dracula. As a mage she might well be more powerful than he was, he realized… was it time to call up an Avatar? Raven, perhaps…
As if to emphasize the woman’s power, an instant after breaking his spell of binding she was engulfed in one of Blue Flame’s plasma attacks… only to emerge unscathed as the flames faded away. But before Totem could begin his summoning Medea turned her attention to him. He felt the power and the weight of her curse hit him like a tsunami of heat. He staggered back, falling to his knees as he fought with all his considerable will not to change… it was a spell of shape shifting, and he could feel his body trying to change, to take the form she willed for him… the form of a pig…
As Totem struggled to ward off the effects of the curse, the block of ice holding the Revenant suddenly shattered, sending shards of flying ice like lethal daggers across the Observatory. Fortunately Scion, Quanta and Chilz were immune, variously, to such damage, and the shards vaporized before they could touch the Blue Flame. But the monster was free again, and it seemed really pissed…
Chilz, who was closest as the Revenant stomped out of the shattered remains of the reflecting pool, jumped forward, aiming a roundhouse punch at its head – the best defense was a strong offense, right? The creature dodged with surprising speed… the thing was a foot taller than him and probably twice as bulky, but moved at least as fast as he did. Chilz barely dodged the creature’s return punch…
Artemis, her amazing regenerative powers having shaken off the lingering effects of Medea’s mystical attack, teleported into the shadows atop a pillar directly behind the Greek sorceress as she focused on cursing Totem. With her attention diverted, Artemis leaped across the gap, aiming a blow at her opponent’s back. But some uncanny sixth sense warned Medea, and she ducked and whirled away… never realizing that she had never really been the target. As Artemis spun over her foe she reached out and snatched the Atlas of Eternity from her grasp, and dropped to the ground.
With a scream of rage, Medea prepared to follow, only to sense another attack… she narrowly dodged one stream of silvery spheres, only to turn directly into the second stream. Hitting her in the gut, the attack doubled her over, and she fell from her pillar, the wind knocked out of her. Nevertheless the Observatory reacted to her will, and another pillar rose up to catch her.
Before the sorceress could recover, however, the Blue Flame unleashed another plasma blast. The azure fire again engulfed her, and she again emerged unharmed… but that first blast had been a feint as the hero gathered all of his energy and let loose with his Nova Blast, something he had only ever used twice before. This time the heat of a star overwhelmed even Medea’s mystical shields, and she plunged off the pillar to slam into the stone of the platform, singed, battered and unconscious.
The Blue Flame flickered, dropped to the ground himself, and reverted to human form, barely conscious himself.
Scion turned his Brain Zap on the Revenant as Medea fell… as he expected, it had no effect, beyond distracting the simple-minded creature at the critical moment. It was clearly loyal to the Greek woman, but also easily distracted. If Artemis could secure the sorceress and get her out of sight before the creature noticed, perhaps it could be talked down…
The records showed that the Revenant seemed primarily to wish to be left alone. It, he, tended to avoid populated areas if left to his own devices, and only turned violent if attacked or thwarted. He was generally only a problem when he came under the influence of others, who had the wit he lacked and could manipulate his simple desires to further their own.
Any one of the Vanguard were smarter than this poor guy, surely together they could calm him down and convince him they didn’t want to fight, and were wiling to send him home in peace. As it turned out, Scion was right. It took awhile, and ultimately it was the return of Artemis, after she’d left Medea under Totem’s guard outside the Observatory, that cinched the deal. Apparently the brute liked pretty women who were nice to him.
Eventually they had him sitting again on the edge of the ruined reflecting pool, talking in his halting way about his home in the swamp and how he missed it… although this was a nice place too, when he didn’t have to fight. Which gave Scion a sudden idea…
He had seen this creature in one of the visions the Great Library had shown him earlier, a calmer, more intelligent, and happier version it had seemed to him, shelving books and seemingly at home while doing so. Had that been an alternate world, like those they’d seen in the Mirror Mosaic, or a possible future? Scion also considered the strange words of the chronozoid, Glimpse, when it had gifted them with what it had called Probability Shards…
“Artemis, can I see one of those mirror shards the Glimpse gave us?” Artemis looked surprised, but pulled the fragments from where she’d stashed them and handed one over.
Looking into the shard’s shiny surface, Scion saw the flickering images of scenes from a dozen different worlds and different Scions, coming and going. While the others, including the Revenant, looked on in curiosity he focused his mind on the image he recalled from the Library… the Revenant, in proper clothes, working in the Great Library, looking peaceful and happy… and as he focused, the scene appeared in the shard itself and then the shifting images stopped, locked onto this singular reality.
“Here my friend,” Scion said, handing the piece of mirror to the hulking figure. “Look into this. Do you like what you see? How does it make you feel?”
Revenant’s face softened as he watched the tiny image of himself, and he nodded. “Good…Revenant liked books once… he thinks… Revenant don’t remember much, from the before… but books is nice…” As he continued to gaze into the Shard the glass began to glow, and in seconds the glow had enveloped his entire body. It lasted only a few seconds, and when it faded the mirror fragment broke into sparkling motes and vanished. Sitting in the old Revenant’s place was… someone new.
He looked exactly like the Revenant they’d fought, including the ragged clothes he wore… but there was some subtle change in the way he held his features. And his eyes held an intelligence they’d not held a moment earlier. He looked around at the Vanguard, and smiled. “I remember now… I was… Cyril, once. But that was a very long time ago… I was in a fog for so long… I don’t remember much… but there’s a library, isn’t there?”
“There is,” Artemis assured him. “Let’s see if we can find you some better clothes, and then we can talk about your future.”
As the Vanguard and their new friend made their way down the Observatory’s steps to the doors, something in the shadow of a pillar caught Scion’s eye. Bending down, he picked up a stuffed bear that had been propped up against the pillar. Odd place for a toy… he shrugged and followed the others. He’d give it to Devaj, once he was recovered, no doubt it was his, or maybe his husbands…
• • • • • •
Back in the main foyer, a still pale Devaj was recovered enough to at least stand, if shakily, and offer his hand to the Sanctum’s new librarian. “I shall be pleased to undertake getting him settled in,” he assured the heroes. “I’m sure he’ll be fine, and it will be nice to have some company around the place… it’s been so quiet, since…”
He trailed off and let Totem help him back to a chair. Before anyone could do more than murmur a few words of concern the front doors suddenly began to open, apparently of their own accord. But instead of the gray light of a rainy Astoria day, it was the flickering yellow warmth of torchlight that poured through the doorway, framing a dark figure.
Stepping forward into the foyer, it proved to be a man in well-used high-tech piece-work armor. Jonny thought he looked like nothing so much as a Star Wars stormtrooper who’d seen some action – except for the skull-like mask covering his face. That was definitely more Skeletor…
“Greetings, Vanguard! I am the Gaoler, and I am here to take custody of your prisoners.” Even through the electronic filtering of his mask, the English accent came through. He stood at ease, no weapon in hand, although he carried several on his person, and waited for a response from the startled heroes.
“Yes, we’ve heard of you,” Scion said, stepping forward. “Thomas Delosano, former architect, famed for designing some of the most secure prisons on the planet – until you went rogue and started acting as a vigilante, imprisoning anyone whom you felt deserved it.”
“And you have recently demonstrated some sort of meta-powers,” Artemis added. “You claim to have access to some sort of extra-dimensional prison, yes?”
“That is correct,” the Gaoler nodded. “I call it the Cell Block, and it is where I hold those prisoners which the ineffective prisons of Earth have failed, all too often, to contain. There is no revolving door into and out of my custody!”
“Well, whatever anyone’s feelings about the justice system, we are not going to be handing over any prisoners to you, Mr. Delosano,” Scion said firmly. “We are not vigilantes, after all, but sworn Federal Marshals, and we uphold the law. It’s for the courts to decide guilt… and any punishments deemed appropriate.”
“Bah, the courts! The West has become weak and permissive, and even when they convict these criminals,” he gestured in disgust at Medea, still unconscious, the Revenant and Carl Mattus, the latter looking miserable in his restraints, “they cannot keep them incarcerated for long. How long do you think it will be before all those you defeated today are back on the streets, committing crimes at will? Either because of molly-coddling courts or ineffective prisons?”
“In the case of two for them, it is unlikely,” Artemis said cooly. “Cyril has had a… transformative experience today, and he will not be causing the world any more problems, I assure you. And Mr. Mattus needs seriously medical care for a condition that is quickly killing him… care I doubt your “Cell Block” is capable of providing.”
“Imprisonment is for punishment, not hospital care. But I see you are adamant in your refusal to turn over the prisoners to me?” Gaoler shook his head in disgust. “I’d had hopes for you new so-called heroes, but I see you’re little different from any of the Alliance bleeding hearts. So be it. I have already taken and incarcerated the other felons you subdued outside… let the future crimes of these three be on your heads, then.
“Unless you propose to take me into custody as well?” His hand strayed near the weapons at his hip, and his head tilted in curiosity.
“You are not our priority today, Gaoler,” Scion said. He would, in fact, have loved to bring in this nut job, but the situation was not ideal. They had little idea of his relatively new meta-human powers, the team was already exhausted after a string of battles, and they had the injuries of both Devaj and Carl Mattus to consider. He also had no desire to expose the Revenant, Cyril, to violence so soon after his… metamorphosis.
“We would appreciate it, however, if you would remand those other prisoners you’ve already taken today back into our custody,” Artemis added. She agreed with Scion’s assessment, and showing the man respect, in the moment, cost nothing. But she wasn’t going to let Gaoler assume they were giving him any kind of approval.
The Gaoler actually laughed at that, then turned his back on the Vanguard, stepping back through the doorway. As soon as he crossed the threshold the yellow torchlight vanished, and the view out the door was the expected one again. A view which included SHADE agents and APD officers frantically searching empty paddy wagons for their suddenly missing prisoners…