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Many of Renata's episodes in this story arc have been punctuated by the music she's listening to at the time. I thought I'd do a little collection of that soundtrack -- let me know if I've forgotten something!

( Cut for videos )

We have heat! It's amazing how grateful one can be for singing steam radiators.

All the Pretty Little Horses

The door chimed, and this time, before I could acknowledge it, the door popped open and in rolled one of the alien Hoover suits.

"Excuse you," I said, deciding to get up, wanting the advantage of height. My dog had abandoned me for whatever hiding place she'd found this time.

The Hoover hesitated, swiveling its hair dryer toward me. It said, in the 50s machine voice, "Unclear transmission."

I crossed my arms and stood with as much hipshot attitude as I could muster. "Well, you sure aren't Joshua."

"You may address me as Joshua if you wish," it said.

"I'm not buying this 'We are all Josh' shit," I said. I noticed a few little differences in this Hoover from Joshua's Hoover -- a subtle metallic weave through the breathing bag, a very slight difference in color. "You can at least introduce yourself after busting in here."

"Our names are private," it said. Although I couldn't read it telepathically, I could certainly perceive an aura of what I chose to perceive as annoyance. "You may address me by whatever misnomer you prefer. Clarify your first transmission."

"I was telling you that you were being rude," I said, deciding that blunt communication was the way to go with this Hoover. "And I think I'll call you Fluffy."

"Ah. In the future, you will perceive that humor does not translate," Fluffy said.

"Oh, I knew that," I said. And neither does politeness, apparently. "What do you want?"

"Our peacebringing efforts are not working with adequate speed," Fluffy said. "We require your powers. You will cooperate."

Although humor doesn't translate, I couldn't help mocking its machine voice. "CO-OP-ER-ATE," I said. "No, it just doesn't have the same ring."

Fluffy apparently had decided to ignore anything I said that it didn't understand. "My family is now in charge of this mission. We require your cooperation."

"What exactly is your glorious mission?" I said. "No one has been able to tell me."

"That is why I have been tasked to be your liaison in place of the one you call Joshua," Fluffy said. "Your world is excessively turbulent. Your people are reaching out beyond the bounds of its orbit and of your solar system. We bring peace to newly developed worlds so that the dimension your people call Psychespace does not become cluttered with your unpeaceful transmissions and interfere with our movement through it."

"Peace through force," I said.

"However necessary," Fluffy said. "We will only interfere for one of your generations, but we will educate your telepaths and others with similar abilities so they can maintain the peace."

"I doubt you'll manage on this world," I said.

"We have successfully pacified hundreds of worlds," Fluffy said.

"How many of them did you pacify by killing everyone?" I said, fists on hips.

"That was unnecessary," Fluffy said. "If they did not accept peace, then they destroyed themselves with their unpeaceful transmissions."

"I begin to see that by transmission you mean speech, thoughts, or bullets," I said.

"You will cooperate," Fluffy said, its aura of annoyance increasing. "We have studied your transmission archive and have identified the individuals with whom you have familial connections."

"You will not fuck with my people," I said, my stomach twisting in a knot at the thought of these fucking vacuum cleaners taking up my mama or my sisters.

"We have no need of further acquisitions," Fluffy said, and something blinked on its hair dryer.

I felt the telepathic screens on my holding apartment fall for just a moment. If I'd been prepared, I suppose, I could've grabbed someone's mind on Earth and told them where I was. But I hadn't expected the exposure, and the sudden influx of the shipboard human minds -- as well as the weird pressure of what was probably thousands of Hoovers -- brought me to my knees.

There was an agonizing psychic ripping sensation nearby, and for a split second, through all the psychic noise in my head, I could feel Ruth. She wasn't conscious, but I'd know her anywhere. And so help me, I recognized the feel of the place she was in on the other side of that bleeding dimensional wound.

The Hoovers had stuck her in the psychic dimension I'd been slowly exploring for the last decade or more. It was just a pocket, but it was stuffed with a bunch of other minds that I didn't have the energy or attention to focus on beyond Ruth. I didn't feel any way out before it sealed back up and my apartment's shields came back up too.

"You fucker," I spat, wiping my face where the involuntary tears had started to run down as soon as the shields dropped. "You shit-sucking sockfucker." I crawled slowly to my feet. "I will see every one of you passive-aggressive imperialist weasels in hell for this."

Fluffy said, "You perceive the reason for your cooperation."

One mistake a lot of people have made with me is assuming that because I'm a fat girl, I don't move fast. But I have spent a long time with not a lot to do but work out and swim, and I am lightning when I put my mind to it, which I did, right then. I had one hand wrapped around the neck of Fluffy's hair dryer and the other bunched into the breathing bag, and I ripped those things sideways with all my might. There were one or two pleasant rending sounds.

"Cease! Stop!" Fluffy squawked.

I lifted the Hoover over my shoulder -- it wasn't much heavier than my mama's Hoover at home -- and walked to the door, which opened for me. I threw Fluffy down as hard as I could on the deck outside the door, and it bounced on the metal floor, pieces clattering off it. It squawked wordlessly.

"You don't come back in here," I said, careful to stay inside my shields. "You send Joshua. Or no one at all, by preference."

I stepped back inside and let the door shut.

I cussed and cried and even screamed for a while, and smashed a couple of plates against the not-glass of my view of Earth. If Ruth was captured, I was utterly screwed. So was the Earth. So was the whole human race. I couldn't think of anyone else who had the ability to stop this fucking huge ship while it was outside of Earth's atmosphere.

I finally settled down and extricated poor terrified Floribunda from my closet. I cried with her on my lap some, and finally settled into the kind of flat vagueness I get after a psychic thumping like I'd just had. My dog tucked her head under my arm and shivered.

My music started to sink in through the exhaustion after a while, though, and I tuned in just in time to hear Sister Rosetta singing,
Everyday (everyday)
Everyday (everyday)
There are strange things happening every day.

If you heal right through the lies
You can live right all the ties
There are strange things happening every day.

I thought, slowly, There's one person who I know feels the same way I do about Ruth, and I have spent considerable time inside her head.

And then I thought, even more slowly, Tomorrow. I'll take that right up... tomorrow.

And Sister Rosetta sang me to sleep.

Still no heat in the little Victorian house that could, but that will hopefully change this afternoon. Meanwhile, enjoy.

Tom stared in fascination at the view from her former bird-eyes displayed on the screen. There were people on horseback everywhere. All the horses were white, and about half the people were wearing silver armor with blue bits on, and the other half were... assorted. She thought she recognized some of them from the hunt. The Witch-Queen had swung herself to the top of the fence, where she was balancing precariously in her froggy wellingtons and gesticulating wildly.

The Dean muttered something, yanked some wires out of the box she was holding, and pushed about half of them back in. The view jumped and swung as, presumably, the raven-robot turned its head. Suddenly sound was being transmitted from the mess Tom supposed she ought to call a battle.

Although it might have been a little over the top to call it a “battle,” as it mostly seemed to consist of people riding in circles, shouting, and only occasionally hitting one another.

“You! Call out my warriors!" the Witch-Queen shouted at her minions. "You! Fetch my staff! No, not the castle staff, you IDIOT, I mean my spellcasting staff!”

There was a lot of miscellaneous noise, and then Tom heard Christopher say, in an undertone designed to carry only to the raven he was doubtless still assuming was Tom, “Neither side looks very effective to me. This isn’t much like a storybook battle.” He sounded disappointed.

A number of tall figures (whether human or robot it was not possible to tell) in appropriately spiky black armor marched up just as a panting servant appeared with the Witch-Queen’s carved and jewel-encrusted black staff. She grabbed it and swung it, nearly pasting the servant in the face.

Colorful lines of sparks snaked along the ground, exploding when they hit a number of the knights in silver and blue (and, to be honest, a couple of the Witch-Queen’s hunters as well).

Christopher said, “That’s more like it.”

The black knights waded into battle. Tom thought armored knights looked rather silly, to be honest, but then there was blood and she felt sick.

The silver knights pulled apart -- like a dance move on stage, thought Tom -- and the silly Prince, mounted on a palomino the size of a Shire horse, rode through. He was wearing more expensive-looking armor and his helmet showed his face, which was pale but set. He pointed his sword at the Witch-Queen.

The black knights froze in place. A couple of wounded hunters and silver knights continued to moan, but the scene was quiet for a moment.

The Prince said, “I have been sent to retrieve the stag and the raven.”

The Witch-Queen responded, with an eyeroll, “Obviously.”

“You may as well give them up,” said the Prince. “Good shall prevail.”

“Bullshit,” said the Witch-Queen. “And you know it.”

The Prince was silent for a moment, on the back of his impassive, massive steed. “I cannot stop,” he said, finally, and his voice sounded terribly young. “This is my only narrative.”

“Narrative sucks,” said the Witch-Queen, extending her staff at him.

The Prince’s horse took a pace forward, seemingly of itself. “I have no other story,” he said.

“Too bad,” said the Witch-Queen, but the hand holding the staff trembled.

The Prince’s horse paced forward a few more steps. He continued to point his sword at the Witch-Queen.

The Witch-Queen said, “Cat got your tongue?”

He replied, “I’m out of lines. I’m glad.”

“Oh,” she said, staring.

He raised the sword above his head, his face set, and dug his heels into the sides of the horse.

As the horse started to flow forward into a canter, the Witch-Queen threw her left arm across her eyes and pointed the staff. There was a flash of light and the usual explosion.

The Prince was flung from the horse to the ground like a doll and his right arm torn mostly off. Tom found herself thankful that his face was turned away from the bird’s vision. He didn’t seem to be breathing. His horse, part of its hide scorched from the blast to a suspiciously shiny undercoat, stood over him, lowered its head, and froze like a statue.

The Witch-Queen threw down her staff and vomited over it.

The Dean chose that moment to drop the control box and pull Christopher up and out of his coffin. She slapped him once, briskly, and he started coughing.

From the depths of Nemo and an old Victorian house with a dead furnace, I send forth this episode, and hope that you enjoy it.

Wide Awake in Wonder City

Angelica grabbed her black leather car coat from the closet, and followed the last office staff and patients out of the clinic, making sure the door shut and locked behind her. She walked quickly, because the night was brisk and the neighborhood wasn't great. Well, no neighborhood was great any more. This was why she was wearing her low office heels, which were easy to run in if she had to, and her favorite loose black skirt for ease of motion. As she went, she subtly raised the light level of the entire block she was traversing, especially when there were a lot of doorways and alleys. It wasn't a neighborhood where she expected to meet the men in black, but it never paid to be lazy, since the men in black weren't the only hazards.

She reached her destination, a little hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant, and found Kit Castaneda, in faded blue jeans and a clean blue buttondown shirt, lounging on the one uncomfortable straight chair that constituted their waiting area. He sprang up when she came in the door.

"Hi, you!" he said cheerily, and kissed her on the cheek.

"'Hi, you'?" she said, mock-archly, kissing his sandpapery cheek. "Is that any way to apologize after last time?"

Kit rubbed the back of his head. "Sorry."

Angelica smiled at the bored waitress who came forward with a couple of menus. "Two, please."

The waitress handed her the menus and gestured at the nearly-empty restaurant. "Wherever you want."

They didn't even consult -- both of them headed for the corner booth where both seats had a good view of the front of the restaurant and there were no immediately neighboring tables. Angelica watched Kit sprawl into his chair from under her lashes, and had to wonder if the man ever sat up straight.

She set her menu down, already knowing what she wanted. Kit was almost hiding behind his, giving it the closest scrutiny she'd ever seen someone devote to food selection. "The pho is the best I've found in town," she said.

"What's the biggest bang for the buck?" he said, still studying the menu.

Probably you, she thought, contemplating him, but said, "The shrimp bowl."

"Excellent!" he said, closing the menu with the air of a man who'd come to terms with his probable execution. "Can I get a beer?"

She shook her head. "They lost their license a couple months ago because of something stupid, and you know how hard it is to get a license nowadays."

He sighed and nodded. She thought about noting that she had two six-packs in her fridge at home, but decided to wait until she was a little more certain about inviting him back at all.

"So," she said, folding her hands under her chin. "Any good poker games tonight?"

He had the grace to look abashed again. "Nooo. But it was a really good poker game."

"Anyone coming after you with baseball bats tonight?" she inquired sweetly, wondering again why she had agreed to go on another date with this man.

"I don't think so," he said cheerily.

The waitress arrived and took their orders. He did, in fact, order the shrimp bowl.

"Why were they after you anyway?" she said after the waitress left them with a large teapot and two very small teacups.

"Oh, you know," he said dismissively, examining his teacup gravely, then filling hers before his own. "Things. Stuff."

"Money?" she said, taking a sip of tea.

He grinned that bright, devastating grin and said, "And things."

She smiled back, and thought about how she'd seen him bumming cigarettes off those same guys a couple days later, laughing and joking and apparently best buds, even while he was sporting a shiner and a cut across his forehead that must've bled like a bitch.

"I've been dying to ask you a question," she said finally.

"Shoot!" he said, adding sugar to his tea.

She leaned forward a bit and said, "Is Castaneda really your last name?"

"Nope!" he said, swigging down the tea.

"Then why use it?" she said.

"It was funny at the time," he said, pouring himself more tea. "And once it was on my fake ID, it was too much trouble to change."

Angelica scanned the room reflexively before replying, "It's not that I disapprove personally, but you might want to be careful about saying things like 'fake ID' aloud. Nowadays."

Kit grinned and snapped his napkin open like a magician about to do a trick. "All ID is fake ID. You can't cram a whole person onto a little plastic card, you know?"

Their food arrived just then, and they both applied themselves to it. Angelica, however, seemed to have more leisure for studying her companion than he for her. He dug into his food like he was starving, his long calloused fingers as steady and determined in their grip on his chopsticks as the chopsticks' grip on the shrimp and noodles. His black hair was loose around his shoulders and one lock kept stubbornly trying to fall into his pho.

After he'd gone through about half his bowl, he finally looked up at Angelica and seemed startled by her gaze. He grinned around his chopsticks and said, "So after dinner, what would you like to do?"

She put down her cup of tea and said, "I was leaving that up to you. You asked me out, after all."

He slurped up an enormous mouthful of noodles and said, "I know where were could get a beer, but it's kind of a hike."

"Let's see if we want dessert before we decide," she replied, putting off the point of no return. A hike, at night, these days, did not thrill her.

"I always want dessert," he said, and he managed to imply both a touch of innuendo and the cheerful greed of a seven-year-old, and she wasn't sure how he managed that.

They ordered dessert. She played with her food, putting off the moment when she had to have The Talk. Kit kept up a stream of conversational storytelling even while consuming his little balls of mochi ice cream whole. There was something about a road trip, and a helicopter, and a motel room full of snakes, Angelica recalled later, though at the time, she was mostly paying attention to his warm brown eyes, the tiny lines around his mouth and eyes, and the glimpse of the hollow of his throat she could see above where his shirt was buttoned.

Finally, the ice cream was gone and he was paying the bill -- something he insisted on and she hadn't fought at all, given that she'd ended up with the bill the last two times. She took a deep breath, wondering whether she was insane or not, and said, "So, I've got some beer back at my place."

He grinned. "Sounds good to me."

"I, uh, kind of feel like we should talk before we go, though," she said. "There are some things you should know." Before we're in a private place that's been soundproofed and you decide you don't like what you find.

He looked up from counting out the tip from his change. "Like what?"

She started with the easy thing. "Well, I'm para."

"Oh," he said, finally just dropping a five next to his plate. "So'm I. Is that something people have talks about here?"

"Yeah," she said, thinking about the boyfriend before last who'd had a herd of cows over finding her para reg card in her wallet. "But there's something else that most people want to know..."

He held up one hand. "Do you actually believe that, with the way people talk around here, I haven't heard a dozen or more stories about you?"

She shut her mouth. "Um, well, I suppose," she said, for lack of anything more intelligent.

Kit smiled -- a real smile, not his usual default grin -- and said, "Most people I know have reinvented themselves. Hell, I've lost count of how many times I've done it. I don't much care who you were. I'm interested in you, right now, as you are."

Angelica was impressed. He'd possibly just given her the most graceful reception she'd ever gotten from someone who wasn't "in the family." Or was he? She'd ask later. She had just one more thing to find out. "And you don't have some kind of fetish?" she said. "Because I've got a lot of experience with that too."

The smile went to the usual grin. "Oh, naw, I buried all those in the desert and couldn't find 'em when I went back."

She stared at him, perplexed. "What?"

Kit laughed. "Never mind, dumb joke. No. I don't. Your call, hon -- bar or your place?"

She stood up, sliding into her coat and grabbing her purse. "My place. Let's go before the not-curfew kicks in."

They went out and hurried through the streets. She continued to boost the light level as they went. Somewhere along the walk, he took her hand. His grip was firm and strangely comforting. She hadn't felt so safe with anyone in a very long time, despite all that she knew about him and didn't know about him. There was also a part of her that vaguely resented the fact that, because she was a woman walking hand-in-hand with a man, the cop they passed only gave them two looks, instead of the long, hard, interrogating stare she was used to when she was out alone too late. (And she was sure that if they'd been white, they wouldn't have gotten even the first look.)

She unlocked her door with one hand on the doorknob so her biosensor security could read her fingerprints. The keyed deadbolt unlocked, and then the rest of the deadbolts unlocked in response to her touch. Kit eyed the doorjamb as they passed through the door. "That's some serious security there," he said.

Angelica wondered for a moment if she could go through with getting beers and chit-chatting and so forth, but impulsively decided that she couldn't. She grabbed him by the front of his shirt and pushed him against the steel-clad fire door. "Can't be too careful," she said as she did what she'd wanted to do all evening: leaned in and kissed that sarcastic mouth.

"I'm a fan of caution sometimes," he murmured some moments later. "So you just let me know where the Do Not Cross tape lines are, okay?"

We're coming up on the end of this first episode of Compass Rose, so I'll probably be alternating with Wonder City until we get to the last part.

As you may recall, the Witch Queen was bored...

Christopher was babbling out the story of the Terrible Roommate, the Cake Disaster, and the Unfortunate Sports Bar to the Witch-Queen, who was leaning over the fence like a cowpoke. Tom, who had heard this saga before, tuned him out and examined her near vicinity for anything that looked as though it might be used to pick a lock. Unfortunately, trees are conspicuously absent of useful lockpicking materiel.

She peered up at the roof of the cage, wondering if she could work a wire loose, while Christopher nattered on about rotten food and inexplicable fire escape incidents to an oddly fascinated Witch-Queen. Suddenly, Tom was struck by a wave of dizziness.

“And then, just to top it all off, we discovered that he was responsible for the constant toilet clogging! I don’t know if I should tell you that story, it’s kind of gross...”

Tom opened her beak, but before she could say anything to interrupt the flow of Christopher’s banal narrative, she toppled over onto her back.

Maybe the brain transfer is failing. Maybe I’m dying. Maybe I’m allergic to myself!

She felt as though she were drowning. She couldn’t make a sound because she couldn’t breathe.

“So she left the cake in the kitchen while we went out to get frosting for it. We really ought to have known better.”

Gray waves, like interference patterns, began to interfere with her vision.

I just wish I didn’t have to listen to this old story again.

As if in accordance with her wish, her hearing began to fuzz out, interrupted with bizarre bursts of white noise. She wondered if it was the blood rushing in her tiny bird skull.

“And when we came back, you wouldn't believe what we found in the kitchen...” But then she couldn’t hear Christopher’s voice at all. Her vision went black. She couldn’t breathe. She was drowning.

Then a hand grabbed her by the hair and pulled her up and out of some kind of fluid. She gasped and opened her eyes.

The Dean frowned, gave a small nod, and released Tom’s hair. Tom realized that she was sitting in a sort of glass coffin filled with blood-temperature goo, and that there were wires in some rather uncomfortable places. “What the--” she coughed.

“Give yourself a moment to breathe,” advised the Dean, and turned to another coffin. Predictably, it held Christopher. Tom noticed that he was wearing a minimum of clothing and looked down in a panic to discover the same was true of herself. She swung herself out of the water, ripping off electrodes as she did so, and looked around. Her clothes were neatly folded on a pillar nearby.

“I don’t want to know who undressed me, do I?” she asked, while she dressed with a rapidity worthy of someone who has just heard her lover’s parents pull into the driveway.

“Probably robots,” said the Dean, resting one hand on the open lid of Christopher’s coffin. “What was he doing just now? He’s very resistant to being woken.”

“Telling a story to the Witch-Queen,” said Tom, jamming her filthy sneakers onto her feet. “I should have thought of the Matrix solution, I just couldn’t parse being a bird.”

“That explains it,” said the Dean, sounding irritated. “Here, give me those,” she added, reaching for the wires which had been stuck to various parts of Tom’s body. She examined them, then put them into ports in the back of a boxlike object which Tom couldn’t help thinking looked rather like a console of some sort. The front of the box was hollow, and the Dean reached into it and began to manipulate something.

“What are you doing?” asked Tom, more diffidently than she had planned.

The Dean sighed. “Well, I had intended to create a distraction,” she said. “But it seems the distraction does not need my help.” She did something and a screen on the wall flickered to life, showing the scene in the garden or pen from the point of view of the bird-waldo Tom had so recently inhabited.

“Oh, bugger me with an angry porcupine,” said Tom, as she saw what was going on.

“...Quite,” said the Dean.

Why, yes, X DID figure something out last episode.

Ringed Round

Nereid walked into Sophie's lab, noting idly that the locks were engaged, but her special permissions got her through.

She pretty much immediately regretted having special permissions.

X was rampaging around the lab, yanking drawers out of the lab benches and stacking them on the benchtops, opening cabinets and rifling through them, pulling every closet door ajar and peering in. Sophie was standing very still in the midst of the chaos, head down.

Nereid had never seen or heard X so angry before.

Sophie said, quietly, "Please stop."

X whirled around, face red and contorted with fury. "If you won't tell me the truth, then I'll fucking well find the truth."

Sophie said, not raising her head, "Do you even know what you're looking for?"

X snarled, "Yes," and, after shoving a sliding door aside, added, "This."

X turned around, holding a plastic bin. Beyond, in the small closet, Nereid could see a small, sleek machine that hummed gently, and then spat something metallic out onto the floor.

The bin held what looked like hundreds of silver metal promise rings.

X plunged a hand into the bin and shook a handful of the things under Sophie's nose. "What. Is. THIS?"

Nereid said, finally, "What's going on?"

Both Sophie and X looked at her. X's jaw set. An expression of agony passed over Sophie's face.

After a silence, X said, "Your girlfriend is working for the alien invaders." X's hand opened and all the rings clattered onto the floor, ringing flatly and bouncing away from Sophie's boots.

Nereid's jaw worked but no voice came out.

"Please," Sophie said, covering her face with one hand, knocking her glasses off and onto the concrete floor, where the main lenses cracked and the frames broke in half at the nosepiece.

Nereid reflexively stepped forward and knelt to pick up the glasses. She stopped, her hand inches from the frames, but also from the scattered rings, and looked up at Sophie.

A tear dropped from between Sophie's fingers onto Nereid's hand. Nereid stared at it, feeling panicked. Sophie got sarcastic. Sophie got snarky. Sophie got angry. Sophie. Never. Cried.

X looked back at Sophie and in a voice whose anger had been replaced with pain, said, "Why?"

Sophie looked at X finally, her face red, eyes swollen, and said in a ragged voice, "Why else? They have Ruth."

X sighed and ran a hand through the perfect, sleek, black hair, tousling it perfectly. "Ruth wouldn't want this."

Sophie curled her lip and said, in what was clearly to Nereid a desperate attempt to regain some poise, "I have not my mother's scruples."

Nereid reached up and gripped Sophie's shirt hem in an attempt to hold onto that moment of sarcasm. She would have done anything for her own parents in the same situation, instantly and without a thought. Flo would yell at her later, but at least Flo would be there to yell.

"They said that if I didn't do it, they had others who would, and who might do it in return for Ruth's -- or someone else's -- death," Sophie said bitterly. "They have all the Gold Stars."

"How do you know?" X said. "How do you know they didn't lie?"

"Because I saw them," Sophie said. "The aliens met me in the middle of the desert -- at Area 51, as a matter of fact!" she added, her voice going high and strained, "and showed them all to me, let me run whatever tests I wanted to make sure I believed they were real. I couldn't wake her up, though I tried."

"They could've been messing with your head!" X said.

"Don't you think I thought of that?" Sophie shouted, gesturing vehemently. "I have been over and over this. I can't find Ruth anywhere in the known universe by any method I've tried except that one moment. I even tried calling Renata Scott to get her to telepathically hunt for her, but Renata is missing too! The aliens claim they're holding the Gold Stars in a dimensional pocket they control, and that's the only logical answer." Sophie's long, thin fingers tangled into her hair and pulled hard.

Nereid stood and put her arms around Sophie, pinning the anguished hands against her lover's skull with her own grip. "All right, we know now," Nereid said in the same tone she'd once used to soothe her panicked pet dog. "We know. Do we know everything?" She glanced at X. X gestured disgustedly and turned away.

Sophie pressed her face into Nereid's shoulder and let her hands fall to her sides. "I made the broadcast technology for them. They knew it was possible, they have a tech like it for themselves, but it wouldn't work with humans. The rings are the only thing I'm still making for them. They produce everything else. Main system. Transmitters. Repeaters, I'm guessing."

"What does it broadcast?" X said, back still turned.

Sophie exhaled, her breath hot on Nereid's neck, and Nereid held her tight. "They have a mentalist of some sort. I think it's an empath, but I don't know for sure. They wanted something that would transmit human psionic powers."

"And you built defenses on the Cosmics' compound and put everyone under house arrest here to protect them," X said, shoulders hunched.

"Yes," Sophie said, voice muffled in the fabric of Nereid's shirt. "It was the only concession I could get from them."

"You know what they're doing to people, don't you?" X said, turning to look at them.

Sophie just nodded, her nose rubbing against Nereid's collarbone.

X faced them and said in a resolute voice, "We're going to stop them. It. Everything."

Sophie said, "I can't help. They'll kill her."

Nereid said, meeting X's gaze, "But I can."

Sophie put her arms around Nereid finally and clung as if she would drown otherwise.

"I'll talk to Mr. Frost," Nereid said. "I'll explain. Get permission. Whatever I can do to help, X."

X nodded and went to the door.

Sophie looked up and said, "Who is going to stop them? They've got the Gold Stars, and the Guardians and all the other major teams are under the influence."

X looked back, handsome and sad and tragic, and said, "Some people they forgot about," and went out.

Here's a Compass Rose episode! Next week, there won't be either a Wonder City or a Compass Rose episode, as I'll be traveling. Hopefully, Wonder City will return the following week! I'm sorry about all the inconsistency lately, and thank you for sticking with me all through it.

“No, seriously,” said Tom, stamping around on the floor of her cage until she could wedge her beak through the bars and get a better look at Christopher. “How do you think they did it?”

“Brain transplant?” asked Christopher listlessly. After trying to scrape the halter and collar off against the fence, the tree in the center of his enclosure, and his own front hooves, his face and neck were streaked with mud.

“Dumbass,” said Tom, poking at the lock on her cage more for something to do than because she thought she might miraculously get it open this time. It was shut with a padlock. Christopher was likewise chained and padlocked to the trunk of the tree her cage was hung in. “This bird probably weighs less than my entire brain.”

Christopher gave the cage a very good side-eye, considering how big and dark and seductive his eyes were now. “I dunno about that.”

“Asshole,” said Tom, but without her usual verve.

“Well, it can’t be magic,” said Christopher, a little desperately, picking up his front hooves and examining them as though he’d never seen anything like them before. (And he probably hadn’t.) “You just can’t have magic in the same place as robots and AI. It doesn’t work!”

Tom snorted.

“No, seriously! It’s like, like, the paradigms cancel each other out! Like matter and antimatter!”

“Christopher, you are full of shit. Stop trying to make ANY of this make sense,” said Tom.

“It’s aliens!” wailed Christopher. “It’s always aliens!” He brightened up. “Hey, maybe this is some sort of alien tech.”

“Alien tech that can squeeze a hundred and fifty pound woman into a four and a half pound bird? I’d like to see that.”

“Maybe it’s something like a holodeck,” said Christopher hopefully.

“In that case,” said Tom, “Tell me why we can’t just walk through these bars and slash or chains.”

Christopher sulkily turned his rear end towards the tree in which hung Tom’s cage. “It just doesn’t work that way.” He rested his chin on the fence and an almost visible aura of gloom descended upon him.

It began to rain. Tom discovered that she didn’t mind this nearly as much as a bird as she would have as a human; she didn’t feel cold or damp or miserable. Small favors, she thought grumpily, and worried some more at the lock on her cage.

Christopher sat down like a dog and looked at the cage and the tree it was hung in. “You know, you really are golden, not just yellow. Your beak looks like it’s made of metal.”

Tom tapped the beak against the bars of the cage and it sounded a little metallic. “Put it down to alien technology," she said, sourly.

“And the tree is weird. The fruit is blue,” he said. Tom looked up and indeed, blue spheres were hanging here and there from the branches. She had assumed they were lanterns.

“I have ceased to be surprised by anything,” said Tom, hunching her shoulders. “Including you, horny boy.”

Christopher ignored her. “I think they’re pomegranates,” he said after a moment. “But pomegranates are supposed to be red. Why are they blue?”

“Because they’re poisonous,” said the Witch-Queen of d’Aulnoy, leaning on the white fence that surrounded their enclosure. She had added a long black cloak to her ensemble, along with a pair of green wellington boots with frogs printed on them. She was also carrying a black lace sunshade which was considerably the worse for water damage.

“Um, hi,” said Christopher. Tom hunched her shoulders further and said nothing.

“Nasty weather, isn’t it?” the Witch-Queen said conversationally. “Bodkins, I’d give my left foot for some sunshine around here.” She sneezed.

“It’s always like this?” asked Christopher.

“Well, it’s pretty much always cloudy, except around sunset,” said the Witch-Queen. “Apparently, sunshine is outlawed when there’s a Witch-Queen on the throne or something like that. So boring. And muddy.” She eyed Christopher. “Speaking of mud, I should send some minions out to clean you up before your rescuers get here.”

“Rescuers?” squawked Tom.

The Witch-Queen heaved a sigh heavy with ennui. “Yes, of course, what did you expect? Some tiresome prince or princess or sultana -- no, that’s a raisin, isn’t it? -- or something or other is bound to show up pretty soon for you.” She looked down at her purple fingernails and smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. In fact, it was exactly the kind of smile Tom remembered from locker rooms in high school.

“Of course, for once I’m not going to have to try to seduce anyone -- I suck at that -- or watch my armies be destroyed,” said the Witch-Queen.

“Oh?” said Christopher, swiveling his big ears toward her. He was still sitting down with his front hooves together, and looked ridiculously cute.

“Nope,” said the Witch-Queen with undisguised satisfaction. “Godmother said that I’m not to worry about that. I’m kind of looking forward to winning for a change.”

“I see,” said Christopher blankly, ears drooping.

“We’re really on the lookout for some kind of Unraveller or something. Someone who picks apart and hates stories.” The Witch-Queen worried at her thumbnail. “I kind of hate stories but apparently I don’t count.”

“Stories can be tiresome sometimes,” ventured Tom.

“They’re boring all the time,” said the Witch-Queen. “Anyway, apparently this person is going to try to rescue you? By disrupting the story? I’m looking forward to it, even if I do have to hand them over to Godmother.” She sighed, then leaned forward over the fence. “You two aren’t very good consolation prizes. You had better be more interesting soon.”

Christopher leaned back, his eyes going wide.

“I am so bored,” said the Witch-Queen.

Here's a little movement and action in Wonder City for the new year!

The Inevitable Law of Revelation

The sight of the massive leather-clad bulk of TinkerMel seated on Madame Destiny's floral sofa, sipping tea from a tiny china teacup, very nearly reduced Angelica to helpless giggles.

"I'm very glad to meet you, Angelica," Lady Justice said, shaking her hand firmly. The old woman was less unkempt than that old newspaper article had implied: her hair was recently cut and washed, so that it was an iron-grey, wavy mass a little shy of her shoulders, and her clothes were old, but certainly clean and there was a neatly mended tear in one knee of the woman's jeans. "Now, Pearl has briefed you, right?" Lady Justice had the keenest, bluest eyes Angelica had ever seen.

"Yes, ma'am," Angelica said, using the honorific automatically. "And I'm fine with your power."

"You can just call me Lady J, or whatever you like, dear," Lady Justice said with a grin.

"You need to get used to being 'ma'am'ed again, Lady J," said a balding elderly man sitting in a straight chair next to the chair Lady J had risen from. He looked mostly in their direction, but his gaze was vague. His smile, however, was utterly charming. "You're the bosslady here."

Everyone settled down and Pearl made introductions to which Angelica attended carefully. The old man next to Lady J was Ira Feldstein, formerly the hero Mister Metropolitan. Madame Destiny was their elderly hostess, and she looked both sick and exhausted. X, Madame's apprentice, was a dashing spark of light in the room, genderqueer as hell and dressed to the nines. And the young, plain Asian woman with the terribly old eyes was Madeline Fukuda, the biggest single-person U.S. scandal of the Second World War. Ah.

No wonder Pearl was recruiting younger people. Poor X.

"All right," Lady J said, limping back to her chair and settling into it. "Let's summarize for our new folks, Angelica and Mel."

"Alien invasion," X said, with a gesture upward.

"A little too succinct, dear," Madame said, sipping her tea.

"Noooo," Angelica said. "That makes sense, actually. I'm guessing they've infiltrated the government and that's where we're getting the little mobs of men in black?"

"Your guess is as good as ours," Madeline said with a little shrug. "We know it's aliens from questioning in the Oracle. How they're controlling things so invisibly and making everything so wrong is still a mystery to us."

"I think I can help with that," Mel rumbled, carefully setting the teacup down on the table and reaching into one of his many inner jacket pockets. He set one of the rings he'd confiscated down on the table, and then held up a little plexiglass display case with another one of the rings taken apart and exploded like a display skull, each miniscule piece attached to a slender pin.

The group leaned in close, but couldn't really make anything of the rings out, though Pearl said, "Wait, isn't that one of those promise rings that the men in black have been handing out? Some of my patients have been wearing them."

"Yes," Mel said. "They're not transmitters, which is what I thought they were originally. I've dissected a dozen of them in various ways. They're similar to the TeslaNet receiver-transformers, absorbing some sort of ambient energy and then transmitting it to the wearer in concentrated form. I can't tell you what the energy is, though." Angelica knew how hard that last sentence had been for him -- Mel prided himself on being able to figure out any device.

The group stared at Mel for a moment. Then, Angelica, thinking of Simon, said, "Could there also be... larger versions of the rings that don't need to be touching someone?"

Ira turned his head toward her, his face lighting up. "Like a speaker system? To focus it on somewhere in particular? Watson said something about the Marigold Lane house being worse for whatever-it-is than elsewhere. And it felt worse."

Mel chewed his lower lip, scowling down at the exploded ring. "Yes, I think so. A repeater type of technology."

"Technologically-enhanced mind control?" Pearl said. When everyone looked at her, appalled, she said, "Well, that's what we're all thinking, isn't it?"

Mel nodded heavily. "I can also tell you this: whoever made this is either human or well-versed in human technology. I've seen some alien tech, and this is totally down-home."

Lady J sighed. "That means the involvement of someone who's made a special study of paranormal powers and 'improbable physics', like Professor Canis."

"Who is missing," Madame noted. "So not her."

"That would explain why I couldn't figure out the energies," Mel mumbled to himself, looking a little pleased. He tucked his show-and-tell items back into his coat. "But Professor Canis has written extensively about her work. I'll do some research, see what I can find."

X had turned very pale, Angelica noticed, but wasn't saying anything.

"If the aliens are projecting something down at us," Madeline said quietly, "then we really do need to get to their ship or ships. Or into orbit at least. And we don't have anyone who can do that."

Madame nodded. "That was the thing we were bringing to the table: we either couldn't contact the superhero teams we know, or they couldn't help us for some reason."

Madeline said, "There are a couple of small, young teams, but all of them are street-focused vigilante types. We don't have any cosmic heroes willing, able, or available."

"Speaking of cosmics," X said, "the Young Cosmics have been forbidden to engage in any major actions by their backer. So no help there. Though..." X's lips compressed into a line and the word cut off. "No, no help there."

Ira said sadly, "Watson Holmes said she didn't want to draw attention to us, since she felt there was attention being paid to her household. I... saw some very disturbing things. That poor boy, Simon... so reduced..."

Feldstein! Angelica didn't quite snap her fingers with realization. Of course! Ira was Suzanne's father-in-law.

She was so distracted by her epiphany that she nearly missed Lady Justice raising her head and saying, distinctly, "We have one last hope, ladies and gentlemen, and it's a damnable long shot."

This managed to rivet everyone's attention.

Lady J turned to Pearl and Angelica. "Do either of you know anyone who's got a knack for focusing other people's minds?"

The two women looked at each other quizzically. Angelica pursed her lips and said, "What do you think about Kendis?"

Pearl made a surprised noise and said, "What is she registered as?"

"I have no idea," Angelica said, "but she once said that if she ever took a superhero name it would be 'Ginkgo Biloba.' Students hire her to sit in the next room when they take exams and shi... stuff like that."

"She works at that para nursing home," Pearl said, rubbing one of her thumb joints thoughtfully.

Angelica looked at Lady J, and she had to admit that there was something thrilling about being the focus of that woman's intense gaze, being the person appealed to for expertise. Yeah, okay, Lady Justice was awesome. "I think so. I don't know how much control of it she's got, though."

"It's worth a try," Lady J said. "All right, I need you, Angelica, to bring that friend of yours to the Stars 'n' Garters Cafe Saturday morning. And I'll need you too, Madeline."

"What are you going to do?" Madame said, a little worried.

Lady J smiled grimly, cracking her knobby knuckles. "A little jailbreaking."

Here's the second Compass Rose episode this week. I hope you're enjoying Tom and Christopher's adventures!

Christopher raced across the suddenly open ground. “Watch out!” shrieked Tom, as a general warning against the hunters circling in from the left, the hounds closing in on his flanks, and any sudden gopher holes.

There was a lot of excited shouting behind them, along with the blowing of horns (Really, thought Tom, you’d think someone was filming this. Who can ride a horse and play a goddamn trumpet at the same time anyway?) and the barking of surprisingly large dogs. Christopher swerved -- he must’ve gotten sight of the hunters circling in and clearly a deer’s eyesight wasn’t a patch on that of whatever-kind-of-bird-Tom-was -- and paused to kick a dog that was leaping at his flanks. Poor thing, thought Tom, but whether it was about the dog or Christopher, who ordinarily would have regarded name-calling to be excessive cruelty to animals, she wasn’t sure.

“Why... aren’t... they... shooting... at us?” panted Christopher, as he darted from side to side in an increasingly futile attempt to shake off the dog pack and regain the shelter of the trees.

“Hell if I know,” said Tom, flapping her wings desperately as she was shaken from side to side. “Fuck! In front of you!”

A set of hunters on brown horses were racing to cut them off. Two of them were carrying something that Tom was able to pick out as the reason no one was shooting, with arrows or otherwise: a net.

“Crap!” said Christopher, and Tom shrieked, “To the left! YOUR OTHER LEFT!”

The net went over them as the hunters raced by in a move that looked like some sort of high-speed dressage event. Tom let go of Christopher’s antlers and made her second abortive attempt to fly, which ended much as the first had. As they rolled in the net together, Christopher kicked another dog that got too close. It rolled over, still barking, and then lay on its side, twitching, barking, and air-running in a repetitive loop. A red-hooded hunter reached down and fiddled with its collar, and it went still.

“Have it picked up by the wagon,” said one of the men on horseback. “That’s three for the repair shop, not too bad.”

The red-hooded hunter nodded, and fiddled with a control mechanism in his hands. The dogs left off circling Christopher and followed the hunter.

Several pairs of hands disentangled the net and presently they were trooping through the forest, Christopher haltered to two horses and Tom in a large birdcage.

“Where are we going?” asked Tom after Christopher had been stubbornly silent for a good quarter of an hour.

No one answered. Apparently, it was beneath them to discuss things with a bird, even one that asked reasonable questions. Tom wondered if the horses were animatronic too, like the dogs, but decided that even if the hunters had been answering her questions, they might not have understood the inquiry. Wait, she should be able to tell the difference by smell, right? Didn’t horses have a strong odor?

That’s funny, Tom thought after a few surreptitious deep breaths. I don’t smell anything. Not even outdoorsy smells. Don’t birds have a sense of smell?

After what Tom thought was some hours of travel (she fell asleep for a while, so had no way of knowing for sure), they arrived in -- of course -- a castle courtyard. Two of the horseback riders chivvied Christopher into the castle, while a third (a woman, Tom noted) carried Tom’s cage. They were carried to the throne room, where there was no one in residence but guards. The throne itself was very tall and had multiple points on the back pointing at the groin arches of the ceiling.

“Please tell Her Majesty that we have succeeded in capturing the stag and the raven,” said one of the hunters.

What, I’m not even a hawk? This sucks.

The guards looked at one another, obviously uncomfortable, and after a moment one of them said, “I’ll go, you went last time,” and exited the room via a side door.

There was a pause.

There was a sound of slamming doors, a crash not unlike crockery hitting a stone wall, and running feet. The guard re-entered the room, breathing quickly, and took up his former post.

There was another pause.

A very young woman stamped into the room. Her relative youth was somewhat underlined by the fact that she was wearing a black gown with the skirt mostly ripped off, torn black spiderweb stockings, a bodice which was rather obviously built for a much more mature figure, and black lipstick. Her black hair was curly and unbrushed.

She was also wearing bunny slippers. Pink bunny slippers.

She threw herself into the throne, swung one foot over the arm, and said, “What is it this time?”

One of the hunters cleared his throat. “We, ah, have succeeded in the quest you have given us, Your Majesty. Here are the white stag and the golden raven, as ordered.”

Tom said, “We have names, you know!”

The woman carrying her cage shook it and snapped, “Quiet, you! Silence in the presence of the Witch-Queen of d’Aulnoy!”

The Witch-Queen of d’Aulnoy paused to examine a purple-painted thumbnail, and worry it with her teeth. “Oh. That.”

There was another uncomfortable pause, and then the hunter who had spoken first said, “Your Majesty... What shall we do with them?”

The Witch-Queen sighed petulantly, examined the ends of her unbrushed hair, kicked off one of her bunny slippers, and finally said, “Oh, I don’t know. Why do I have to do all the work around here?”

The hunters looked at each other uncomfortably.

The Witch-Queen of d’Aulnoy frowned and stood up, her bare foot hunting absently for the bunny slipper she had kicked off (which was over on the right side of the throne). “You’re so lazy, all of you!” She pointed one finger at the ceiling, and the candles in the three enormous iron chandeliers burst with red sparks.

Everyone cringed. The Witch-Queen sighed, gave up the bunny slipper as lost, and kicked off the other one. She folded her arms and wandered over to the side of the throne room, peering out of one of the huge stained-glass windows. “I dunno, lock them up or something. I don’t care, even.”

The hunters bowed. “It shall be as you command, Your Majesty.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She flapped a hand at them without turning around and their captors hustled them from the room.

As they were being led (or carried) down a number of stone corridors, Christopher finally spoke up.

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

Tom would have given a great deal to have been able to hit him over the head at that moment.

My apologies for not having another Wonder City and for not posting this earlier. It's been a terrible week. I'll post a second episode of Compass Rose later this week. I hope your next couple of weeks (whether they're holidays for you or not) are excellent and low-stress.

”I still think I’ve got the worst of it,” said Christopher.

“Fuck you,” said Tom. “At least you can walk.”

“It’s like being on all fours and strapped onto stilts,” complained Christopher.

Tom concentrated and tightened her toes where she was perched on Christopher’s gilded antlers. “Well, this is like having my arms chopped off and replaced with billboards. At least you’re used to being on all fours.”

Christopher angrily shook his head. “Screw you, at least I’m getting some, your last date was six months ago!”

“Quit it, I’m gonna hurl!” Tom helplessly flapped her wings as she was shaken back and forth.

Christopher abruptly stopped, his head and ears turning to catch a sound neither of them wanted to hear: a hunting horn.

“That’s what I think it is, isn’t it,” said Tom.

“Oh fuck, ohfuck ohfuckofuckohfuck,” said Christopher, his head alertly turning from side to side. “I can barely walk and now this!”

Tom flapped again, trying to keep her balance. She could hear the hunt with exquisite clarity, but it had a curiously far-off quality, as if she were hearing it through porous glass. “It’s over to your left,” she said.

“I know,” said Christopher, tossing his head a little and making her vision bounce.

“Settle down,” said Tom. “Let’s just take this easy...” She could hear the hunt moving nearer.

“Hang on,” said Christopher tersely.

“WAIT--!”

Christopher leapt and was off. He managed all right for about twenty strides, leaping over obstacles and sliding through carpets of old wet leaves. Then he jumped over a fallen tree, discovered an unexpected gully on the other side, and went down ass over teakettle.

Tom blinked at the sky, wondering if she had been impaled by Christopher by accident. No, this appeared to be a rosebush. It was thornless, or else the thorns were too small to notice. She thrashed about in it, leaving behind a number of her golden feathers, until she emerged enough to look around for Christopher.

No Christopher, but a long muddy track down into the ditch suggested where he was. She completed disentangling herself and waddled (there really was no other word for the angry sort of stamping walk) down the track to peer at Christopher, who was lying in a boneless heap like an unhappy kitten with unusually long legs and antlers.

“Get up,” she said, listening with one (nonexistent) ear to the hunt, which was still getting closer.

Christopher opened his big brown eyes and looked at Tom meltingly. “I don’t know why I’m not bruised all to hell and back,” he groaned.

“I don’t know why you didn’t break your neck.”

He shook his antlers free from the embracing arms of another rosebush and stood up shakily. Then he lowered his head long enough for Tom to clamber onto the antlers, and stepped slowly and carefully out of the ditch.

“Enough running,” said Tom. “Let’s go slowly and carefully in a generally away direction.”

“Agreed,” said Christopher, his voice still shaking.

He ended up running in the end, of course.

Something to distract you from the news of the real world. Let's pretend that Wonder City is somehow having a worse time than we are.

Where We Must Be

I stared at the Earth on the wall-sized screen that pretended to be a window in my exclusive, yet mandatory, penthouse. My dog slept on my lap, trailing a leg off one side and lolling her head off the other side. She snored, occasionally obscuring Billie Holiday's "Lady Sings the Blues". I kept music playing constantly now -- my "hosts" had put the entirety of any repository of music I'd requested at my disposal--and it made my confinement somewhat more tolerable.

I was lonelier than I'd ever been in my bunker under Wonder City.

I wondered how my mother was doing. I wondered if my sisters had noticed anything had changed in the world. I wished I knew where Ruth was. I considered trying to reach out to get hold of Oum Veha, my old friend in Cambodia. He and I usually communicated via a mental link -- he can't be around electronic devices easily, since he is a Class 10 electricity generator -- and he's one of the few people I think I can reach out to easily. But it occurred to me that the aliens had definitely neutralized one of the Class 10 club -- me -- and may have neutralized another -- Ruth -- so what was the chance they had him? Or, worse, had used one of the low-grade telepaths I'd sensed around the ship to somehow alter his mind?

Besides, I'd tried to reach him first thing and couldn't penetrate the shields.

So I sat and stared at the Earth, and wondered if I had any options at all in this clusterfuck, or if I would just be sitting here until some superheroes (or supervillains -- it had happened!) Saved The Day (TM).

Which is when there was a hesitant, barely discernable knock at my door.

I only really noticed it because it was in a break between Lady Day and my girl Nina. Floribunda raised her head, perked her ears, and looked at the door when it happened.

I thought about getting up, but could not summon sufficient damns to give to the effort, so just said loudly, "Come in."

The door opened after a moment. I swiveled the chair to look at my visitor.

She was the sort of woman who had probably been pop-and-fresh pretty at 16, with dark hair and big dark eyes and milky-white skin with a few strategic freckles. However, at what I guessed to be about thirty, she had wilted into one of those women with transparent skin and dark circles under her eyes and blue veins running over the backs of her hands. She was wearing a rumpled pink blouse with a polyester sheen and mommy jeans, and well-worn girly running shoes.

We stared at each other for a long moment as Nina sang along,
But oh, I'm just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood.

Then I felt something sliding over my mind, something that I supposed to most people would feel like a soft fleecy blanket, but to me felt like...

Let's put it this way. I mostly only ever felt like that in middle school, before my trip to the institution, when some of the little white girls would feel up my hair and then ask permission to do so.

I mentally swatted at it, and it was sticky, clinging to my mind with gooey pink tendrils until I gathered my wits enough to just burn it the fuck out of my mind.

She recoiled hard, grabbing for the door jamb to hold herself up. Her other hand went to her forehead. "What happened?" she said in a soft, fading sort of voice.

"I just pushed you out of my skull," I said through gritted teeth. "In my world, it's polite to ask before you go fucking with someone's head." Unless it's a case of self-defense, I added to myself.

"Oh, I... I'm sorry," she said, checking her ponytail and the hair that was pulled tight against her scalp in front. "I just... I don't really control it. I mean, I never have controlled it, until now, and now I'm still not very good at it..."

I gave her a bored look. "Come in or go out," I said, laying a hand on Flori's neck. "I don't want my dog to get out." Lord only knows what she'd get into in a spaceship, I thought.

The woman made a little incoherently apologetic noise and scooted inside the doorway enough to the door slide shut behind her. That was not the side I'd hoped she'd choose.

"So I..." she began, but then she looked up, saw my extremely unwelcoming expression, and immediately stumbled over her words, flushing blotchily. She pulled her ponytail over her shoulder and nervously wound a strand of hair around and around her finger.

I let the silence fall. I found it vaguely interesting that Flori wasn't reacting as badly to this woman as she'd reacted to the man, but then I suspected that whatever mental bubblegum the woman emanated might work on dogs too. I'd have to check that later.

She sighed. "My husband told me about you," she assayed.

I raised my eyebrows. "Oh, so you're Mrs. Mark West." And the "the most powerful paranormal human" in the aliens' employ. "I'm sure he was very complimentary about me."

"No," she said. "My husband is a man of... fast judgments."

"Hasty, even," I said.

She gave me a fleeting vaguely hunted look from under her brows that made me think, Oh, hell no, I will not have to have this conversation here.

"So why are you here?" I said. "It would be nice if you'd get to the point. I have a busy schedule of dog-grooming and window-staring to get on with."

Aretha came in for a bit here, while girlfriend tangled her own hair up, singing about chains of fools. Hah.

"Do you have a name?" I finally said, and thought, Because I am so not calling you "Mrs. West," junior miss white lady.

She looked up at that, giving me a big-ass blank stare before saying, "Sara."

"And just so you know, my name is Renata Scott, though your husband probably referred to me by a different word altogether."

She flushed all blotchy again, and I knew I was right.

There was another long pause, long enough that Aretha finished up and we were back to Nina, and Nina was singing,
Now you're living high and mighty
Rich off the fat of the land
Just don't dispose of your natural soul
'Cause if you do you know damn well
That you'll go to hell (yes, you will)
You'll go to hell.

Finally I said, "Well, this has all been just stimulating..."

"I just wanted to know!" she said suddenly, clutching the end of her ponytail.

I waited.

"I just wanted to know," she repeated more softly, "if this... having all this power gets... easier. Because they gave it to me. I had it, only a little bit, before, and I didn't know it, but then they did something to me when I was sleeping -- Mark told them it was okay -- and now I have all this... this." She waved her hands in a helplessly grand gesture.

I watched her for a moment, lips pursed, and then said, "It depends what you're doing with it."

She met my gaze soppily, looking like she was about to burst into tears, looking like she wanted someone to pat her head and tell her it was all right. "I'm making the world a better place. Only it keeps not working the way I think it will."

"Then you're doing it wrong," I said bluntly. "Controlling other people is wrong, full stop. No matter what the aliens say, no matter what your charming hubbykins says."

"But there's so much I can do to help!" she exclaimed, taking three steps toward me, still with that look of appeal.

"If you think that before you think of the harm you can do," I said, "there's nothing more to be said." She staggered one more step, reaching out, opening her mouth to say something, and I snapped, "Don't come to me for comfort. I am no one's mammy, but especially not yours."

She made a little gasping noise, turned, and ran out of the room.

I sat and fumed for quite a while as I picked chewed bubblegum out of my dog's mind before it hardened and stuck. Nina went on to sing,

Some say that hell is below us
But I say it's right by my side
'Cause you see evil in the morning
Evil in the evening, all the time
You know damn well
That we all must be in hell
We got to be in hell
We all must be in hell
We must be in hell.

Okay, I suck, and couldn't get another Wonder City out this week. Here is another episode of the Dean, since I left you on rather a cliffhanger (or perhaps that was cliffplunger) two weeks ago.

Everything looked very strange. Tom blinked, and it was also very strange that she could hear herself blink. That was a branch. That was a tree. That was another tree. She seemed to be very high up...

She turned her head slowly and looked from side to side. Turning her head took an odd sort of effort, the way it did when she was very drunk. Yes. Bark. Leaves. Tree.

FUCK me, I am SITTING in a TREE!

What she had intended as an exclamation came out as a sort of... squawk.

Below her, something crashed. She looked down (still with the sort of conscious effort she usually associated with trying not to hurl, although thankfully she was not nauseated), and saw something white.

A white figure staggered into the clearing. It was... an animal. A big animal. A deer. It walked like it was drunk, or perhaps... drugged? The legs kept going in various unexpected directions, with unfortunate and sometimes comic results. Tom repressed an urge to giggle.

It couldn’t have been a newborn, although that might have excused how it staggered about. It was huge, and furthermore had horns. The horns were gold. Tom wondered distantly whether it came from some sort of stable and if someone had the job of painting it. Perhaps they had to drug it to get it to stay still and that was why it was staggering all over now...

The deer made a distressed honking noise and Tom giggled. Or, rather, she tried to giggle. It came out as a squawk, again. She shook her head impatiently and nearly fell off her tree branch, spreading her wings to keep balance.

Spreading her... what?

Tom shrieked, “What the FUCK!” and this time it came out almost coherently.

The white deer below her attempted to stand up on its hind legs, bellow, and dash off into the forest, all at the same time. It crashed sadly sideways into a blackberry bush.

My schedule has just gone to heck, but here I am, giving you another Wonder City just under the November wire. I hope you enjoy it!

Enter the Dragon

Nereid was surprised and pleased to open the front door of the Young Cosmics' headquarters to find X leaning indolently against the stair rail. X was wearing a hip-length double-breasted black wool coat against the spring chill, and also neatly creased grey trousers over long, slender black-and-white patent leather oxfords. X's hair was a little shorter these days than it had been when X and Nereid were first introduced by Brainchild, with a little more masculinity and a little less androgyny. Still, X was striking, handsome and beautiful at the same time, and always made Nereid's heart do a little pit-a-pat. Just a little.

"Hey," X said in a smoky tenor. "How's it going?"

Nereid smiled and stepped back from the door. "Not bad," she said, lying through her teeth because she was really feeling pretty stir-crazy, trapped in the headquarters.

X strolled into the headquarters and Nereid saw the line of tension across those admirable shoulders relax. There was something, Nereid had noticed, about their headquarters. It was palpably more comfortable, like someone turning off a white noise machine you didn't realize was running. It didn't stop her from hating being cooped up there -- the headquarters was not designed to be some sort of self-contained habitation. Sophie often described it as being built in "Soviet Brutal" style, a bizarre, ill-lit convolution in concrete and other materials designed to resist explosions and similar supervillain assaults.

"So," Nereid said, shutting the door and turning to lead X toward the flat she shared with Sophie, "what brings you to this part of town?"

"I came to ask you all for a favor," X began, but they turned the corner and ran smack into a knot of Cosmics.

Wire, Mercury, and Vector were clustered around a tall, tanned man with longish white hair that sported a heavy lock hanging dramatically over one eye, wearing an exquisitely tailored pale grey suit. Nereid had only seen the man that her team leaders called "Mr. Moneybags" a few times in her tenure with the Cosmics, but she knew him on sight anyway -- who could miss him, really?

"Ah, Nereid," he said in a low, faintly British drawl. "How are you, my jewel?"

Wire shot Nereid a frustrated glance that Nereid knew to interpret as, You have derailed him just when I thought we were getting somewhere, and then Wire exhaled hard enough to make her floaty blue forelock flip back across her otherwise closely-shorn head. Nereid smiled quickly and nodded. "Fine, sir," she said quickly, trying to sidle past them. Mercury, resplendently muscular in his tight black spandex outfit, at least, made way for her, and she thought, for a bare second, that she could get away.

"Mr. Moneybags" managed to intercept her, twining his way between Vector and Wire, who half-reached for his sleeve, but wisely withdrew her hand. He leaned against the wall in her path in a slightly predatory way and looked down at her from his always startling height. "Are you really well, though?" he pursued. "You looked a touch pale, my dear."

"I'm fine, sir," she repeated, then said, "Have you met X, sir? X, this is Michael Frost, the Cosmics' backer. Mr. Frost, this is X."

"Ah, yes, I recall you," Mr. Frost said, raising one pale eyebrow. "You have some interesting potential, you know."

"I know," X said with a tight smile. "It's a pleasure meeting you again."

Mr. Frost's attention was not long held by X, though. His icy blue gaze was turned back to Nereid before she could think of another distraction. "I don't want you becoming ill," he said.

"Sir--" Nereid clamped down on a moment of rage, bit down on a demand to be let out of confinement, and swallowed her unhappiness, giving herself quite a stomachache. She was saved from answering by her usual rescuer.

"Hello, Michael," Sophie said, somehow appearing at Nereid's elbow. "I was wondering when you'd turn up."

Mr. Frost straightened up to loom from his full height and turned to face Sophie. His expression didn't change much at all, something that had always creeped Nereid out about him. "Brainchild," he said. "Thank you for pulling them out of an untenable situation. Again." His gaze darted to Mercury in particular, and Nereid had the rare pleasure of seeing their boisterous, cocky leader wilt.

"That's my job," Sophie said, taking Nereid's arm. "Isn't it?"

"I wish you had managed the press as well," he said.

"The press isn't amenable to my style of prediction right now," she said, also taking X's arm. "Logic doesn't work very well in the current climate."

His lips compressed. Sophie's face was her most indestructable mask of cool cynicism, and the extra lenses of her glasses were fanned down over one side of her face, which Nereid always found unsettling.

Mr. Frost turned on Mercury, Wire, and Vector with cool precision. "I will make myself clear now," he said in a low, penetrating voice. "My team will not become involved in any long-term situations that will bring the gaze of the government or media down on it. These short-term emergency actions are quite enough, and I understand that it would be... irresponsible for any hero group to fail to respond to such emergencies. But there will be no pursuit of nemeses, no trips to space, nothing of the sort, and you will always respond to even small emergencies with a full team, unless waiting would endanger lives, you understand?"

Wire and Mercury said, reflexively, "Yes, sir," at the same moment.

Sophie chose this moment to silently draw Nereid and X down the hall and around the next corner into the flat.

They all exhaled simultaneously when the door of the flat was shut.

"That was about the university thing, wasn't it?" X said.

"Yeah," Sophie said, pushing off from the door and moving into the kitchen. "And more, probably, but it's hard to tell with him."

"I can never tell anything with him," Nereid said.

Sophie shrugged and said, "Humans find it hard to read Reptilian-Americans. Want a drink, X?"

"Sure," X said, sitting on an arm of the sofa.

Nereid stopped and stared at Sophie. "He's a Reptilian-American? Why didn't you tell me?"

Sophie gave her a slightly disbelieving look, and Nereid knew instantly she'd said something stupid, and could almost say, word for word, what came out of Sophie's mouth next. "Would it have made a difference in how you interacted with him?"

Nereid sighed explosively and moved around the room, turning on more lights. "No," she said, then added, in a brighter tone to X, "You said you came to ask us a favor?"

X grimaced and glanced toward the door. "I was," X sighed, "but I think that point is moot."

"Oh, was it something Mr. Frost just forbade us to do?" Nereid said, and she could feel a whole vista of hope of getting out of the building opening up before her.

"Probably," X said with an air of gloom.

Sophie brought X a tumbler of tawny liquid and said, "No."

X nodded and sipped the drink.

"You don't even know what it is yet!" Nereid protested.

"I'm not going to buck Michael on anything he just said," Sophie said, handing Nereid a similar glass of alcohol, "because he's right. Completely. Fucking. Right. This team mostly needs its nuts pulled out of the fire, and mostly by thee and me, sweetheart."

"There's something really wrong out there and I'm sick of doing nothing," Nereid started.

"Nereid, it's fine," X said mildly. "Sophie knows her stuff here."

Nereid caught some sort of look between X and Sophie, something sharp from X and something almost... guilty? from Sophie. Looking back and forth between them, she said, "What?"

X looked at her, one elegant eyebrow raised. "She knows something she isn't telling us, isn't she?"

Nereid blinked. She'd thought it was all in her own head, but if X had seen it too... "I've... thought so," Nereid said slowly.

Sophie raised her chin in a defiant look.

X considered her gravely, then shrugged. "I know you too well to try to press you. You'd rather make something up than tell us if we do."

Nereid looked down into her glass, then looked back up and said, "I trust you, Sophie."

The defiant look shattered with sudden violence and a cry that sent Sophie fleeing to the bathroom. Nereid looked at X, alarmed.

X nodded and shrugged. "She'll tell us when she can." One corner of X's rather perfect mouth curled up in a wry smile. "Or when we can squeeze it out of her."

The holiday schedule explosion has begun early; that and one of our cats being urgently ill means that you get more Dean rather than more Wonder City. I hope no one minds too much.

“Don’t you think it’s a little dangerous to have him here?” asked Tom, jerking her chin at their guide-cum-attacker. “I mean, if this is the real movement against...”

Mor laughed. “Ach, lassie, as if Godmither daesn’t already knaw aboot us!”

Iona said, “Weel, aboot us twa at least. Ye’ll nootice that th’oothers are keeping a far distance in’the gloaming.”

Tom paused a moment to note that there really were people who said “gloaming,” and Christopher said, “So, it’s not secret, the... Web?”

“It’s aboot as secret as a Witches’ sabbat,” said Mor, “Which we resemble a bitty, no?”

All around them, people were slipping off into the woods in twos and threes, leaving the clearing darker and darker. The Dean said, “It’s not the sort of thing one likes to accuse one’s neighbor of being at, I see. Because then people will ask how you came by the information.”

“Och, aye,” said Iona. “And the President may have her suspeecions, but she’s but one pairson, after all. We’ve left ye some gear and we’ll discuss gettin’ ye to Wu or posseebly Burrton, they’ve got big movements there.”

“I don’t understand why you’re not more upset about him,” said Christopher. Their former guide sniffed in an offended manner.

“Laddie, we’ve got several cells of resistance made up of clones like him,” said Mor, kindly but a little sharply. “Mostly Villain-based like yerself,” nodding at him, “as well as Hags, o’course, and Step-sisters and -brothers, and a goodly parcel of Comic and Pathetic Sidekicks as well as some Romantics, not too many. We welcome all.”

With that, they left, and Tom and Christopher were faced with the task of putting together their camping gear, as the Dean was wandering around staring at things and their guide was sitting with his back against a tree having an existential crisis. Quite literally, it turned out.

“No, no, don’t mind me,” he said. “I’m just wondering whether I should continue to exist or not.”

Tom resisted the urge to kick him and unpacked what felt like blankets in the dark. It was a long and chilly wait until dawn, but she fell asleep eventually.

Tom was woken by a combinations of factors: cold, a tree root poking her in a way that reminded her unfortunately of her last one-night stand, what sounded like a party gone horribly wrong, and... galloping? Was that galloping? As she opened her eyes, the “party” resolved itself to the sound of dogs barking and, ridiculously, horn music. She could see the silhouette of the Dean next to the tree which was so uncomfortably intimate with her nether bits, and managed a “Wha?” which was remarkably coherent for her, pre-coffee.

The Dean glanced down. “My guess is that the story is continuing even though we have removed ourselves from it. I wonder how it’s been edited?”

This made little sense to Tom, so she turned and nudged Christopher, on the theory that if she had to be awake at this lovelorn hour in a horrible wood, freezing and listening to someone talk nonsense, so did he. Christopher grunted and she nudged him again, harder.

Christopher sat up, his hair standing on and and stuck through with leaves, like a hedgehog’s. “What’s going on?” he demanded.

“I wonder,” said the Dean. Then she added, quite calmly, “I think one of us, or all of us, might be the object of this hunt, you know.”

Tom startled up. “Shouldn’t we run?”

“They’ll be on horseback,” said the saturnine man, gloomily. “What good will running do you, or any of us?”

“I’ve been wondering,” said the Dean conversationally, “How Godmother manages these sorts of stories. It’s easy to produce the illusion of transformation from outside, but how do you produce the illusion when it’s the Guest who needs to be the protagonist? I can think of several ways but they don’t seem to mesh with--”

Several things happened at once. On the other side of the clearing, a whole troupe of people on horses (white horses, Tom noticed peripherally: of course) burst into view. They were all dressed in bright colors and accompanied by rather large brindled and white dogs. Several of them were carrying banners or horns. There was something so staged about the entire thing that Tom was completely unsurprised that the sun chose that moment to lift out of its dawn cloudbanks and flood the clearing with bright horizontal spears of light, made slightly unreal by the mist still clinging to the trees.

Their guide gave a hoarse cry. Tom turned in alarm, just in time to see him seize Christopher by the ankle. “No!” he said. “Don’t run!” Tom kicked him, freeing Christopher, and followed her friend in scampering back into the wood.

There was no hope of following the trail from the night before; they were running blindly. After a moment or two of panic, Tom had the thought Where’s the Dean? and looked back. The Dean was not following them. But she could hear horses behind, she was sure...

There was a crash ahead of her and she turned back just in time to see Christopher slip down a bank. She heard, “Oh SHII--” and a mighty splash.

Her momentum carried her up to the edge and would have carried her over, but she grabbed the branch of a tree, which just held her flying weight. “Christopher?” she called, looking at the rippling pond. There was no sign of him. “CHRIS, GODDAMMIT!”

The branch she was dangling from broke. There was just time for her to say, “Well, fuck m--” before she hit the water.

Wonder City returns! Thank you all so much for your patience.

The Fall of the House at Marigold Lane

Ira tapped each step of the bus with his cane as he descended -- three steps, then the step down to the pavement. The bus door accordioned shut behind him and he heard the engine roar as the bus accelerated away from the stop.

He stood there a moment, trying to squint through the bright clouds in his eyes, hoping to spot a figure or anything beyond the post of the sign that probably denoted the bus stop.

Then there were hurried footsteps crunching on gravel. "Sorry, Ira," Watson Holmes said, coming up to him a little breathlessly. "Got distracted by folks in the yard."

"It is a nice warm day," he said, smiling in her direction.

"Can I help?" she said, and took his hand when he reached out, tucking it in her elbow. She was wearing a thick flannel shirt. They began a slow stroll.

"It's quiet out here," he said, paying most attention to where his feet were going. "I remember this neighborhood. They really built it up in the '50s, but there were a few old farmhouses and such out here before that."

"Yeah, we're going to Marigold Lane," Watson said, "which is a dead end street at the end of this one. There's a mansion there, late Victorian, three stories and a carriage house and all. The outside looks like a madman with a jig saw was allowed to gingerbread it, and it's a Painted Lady in yellow, red, and blue. Pretty spectacular. Our landlord built it when he first moved to Wonder City."

Ira puzzled over this a moment. "And he first moved to Wonder City... before it was Wonder City?"

"Yep," Watson said. "He's one of those types."

"Ah," Ira said sagely, mentally cataloguing all the different types her landlord could be.

"Okay, now we've got five steps down from the street to the front walk," Watson said, slowing down so Ira could feel his way with his cane.

He felt terribly awkward doing it all, and awfully self-conscious of his awkwardness. He cringed when he stumbled over the join of the pavement, but Watson kept him safely upright. Not that he'd actually take any damage to anything but his dignity and clothes if he did fall.

"The front walk isn't precisely straight, and it's in bad repair," Watson said, her voice warm and friendly. "We'll just go as slow or fast as you can."

"So, about why I came..." Ira started.

"Hang on," Watson said in an undertone. Louder, she said, "Hi, Megan."

"Oh, hello, Irene." Ira blinked at the voice -- definitely the voice of Megan Amazon but... something was different. Like she was... trying to imitate Marilyn Monroe? And... Irene? "Oh, hello, Mr. Feldstein! It's so nice to see you!"

He smiled bravely and shook her hand. Her handshake was... strangely limp. And she was wearing perfume. Perfume? She hadn't seemed like the sort to wear perfume. But he was hardly a judge of young women these days. He'd never been much of a judge of women. Any women. Why did everyone think he'd been such a womanizer anyway? He'd been a good, upright man.

"Hey, Simon," Watson said, interrupting Ira's brown study.

Ira turned with a smile. Simon Canis, at last! He stuck out his hand. "Son, it's good to run into you," he said.

A furry head bumped his hand from below, and a cold nose brushed his wrist. A long tail thumped against his calf.

"Simon?" Ira said hesitantly, letting his hand drop onto the thick fur. He remembered, suddenly, that Simon was a shapeshifter.

"Yeah," Watson said sadly.

"He's a good boy today, isn't he?" Megan said inanely. "Simon and I are headed for walkies! We'll see you later, I hope, Mr. Feldstein!"

Ira scritched Simon's head and said, in a low voice, "Oh, son."

Simon whined and licked Ira's hand before having to follow the heavy steps crunching away on the walk.

Ira let Watson lead him onward, across the apparently never-ending front yard. She said, "So on our left is the carriage house, which is where Jack Hammer lives these days. Not that I've seen him recently."

"Jack Hammer, the Iron Sergeant?" Ira said, perking up a little and looking uselessly in the indicated direction. "I didn't know he was still in Wonder City. He left for a while, back in the 60s, I think."

"Yeah, he used to work construction for Ultimate Construction," Watson said, "before the big reorganization."

"What reorganization?" Ira said.

"Oh, some sort of hostile takeover -- okay, three steps up here," Watson said. "It would take a long time to explain."

"But Dr. Thomas --" Ira began, taking the steps slowly, forgetting for a moment the Gold Stars and their space mission.

"Is missing," Watson said. "Hang on, let me get the door."

Inside, the front hall smelled of furniture polish and old leather, and was even quieter than the neighborhood had been. The floor was hardwood, given the sound of the cane's taps. Ira folded up his cane and tucked it into the pocket of his old sportcoat.

"My place is up on the third floor," Watson said. "Can you make that climb?"

"Slow and sure," Ira said with a smile. She'd asked him that on the phone, too. He was a blind old man, after all. It would serve him right if he had another damn heart attack climbing those stairs. He should've just stayed home. This was ridiculous. He should just mind his own damn business. He added reassuringly, "I've got my nitro with me, just in case."

Watson walked slowly up the stairs to the second floor with him. "So, our landlord lives in the basement, when he's in house at all these days -- haven't seen him for a few months, says he's off on family business. Megan has some of the rooms on the first floor, and up here on the second floor, there are two apartments. The one on the right used to be Simon's."

"What happened to him?" Ira said as he paused to catch his breath.

"I'll tell you in a bit," Watson said. "Let's get upstairs."

"Didn't that young woman... G, was it?... live here too?" Ira said, making his way to the next set of stairs.

"She did," Watson said, her tone reluctant and flat. "She, ah, decided to stay in Europe for a few more years. So someone else is living in her apartment now."

"Oh, well, I'm sorry to hear it," Ira said, trying to soothe whatever feathers he'd ruffled. He felt terrible for bringing it up. The stairs took his breath for several minutes after that.

Watson guided him to a chair in a room that smelled somewhat of cats and, after a moment of what seemed to be shooing of one of said cats, said, "Okay, you can sit down now."

Ira was surprised by the comfort of the chair. When he ran his hands over the arms, it reminded him of his old friend Molly Pitcher's favorite chair, leather smoothed silky with age and wear. He wondered where Watson had got the chair, or if she'd inherited it.

"Would you like something to drink?" Watson said, sounding vaguely flustered for the first time in Ira's short acquaintance with her.

There was a tickle in his throat. "A glass of water would do me fi--YIPE!" He jumped as something small and furry leapt into his lap.

"MWAH!" said the cat in his lap.

"Really?" Ira said, extending a hesitant finger in the general direction of the animal that was trampling his skinny legs. "I'd never have known."

"That's Madame Blavatsky," Watson said, pressing a glass into his hand. "I think she likes you."

The cat, whose paws felt very tiny indeed, stomped around for a few more moments, and then curled herself into a tiny furry ball in Ira's lap. Ira very carefully stroked her fur. The cat vibrated with an inaudible purr.

"So," Watson said, and Ira could hear her sitting on something opposite him. "About why you came."

"Oh! Yes," Ira said. "I... expect you've noticed that things are a bit odd."

Watson snorted a laugh. "You might say that."

"Well, there's some of us who've been..." He tried to think of a good way to briefly explain the gatherings in Madame Destiny's living room. He was such a stupid man, a terrible man, he was surprised that Suzanne put up with him the way she did, that Watson was being so patient with him. It must just be the fact that he was an old blind man and it was the nice thing to do to listen to him. "... thinking about all of it, you know?"

"I'm right there with you," Watson said.

"Well, we were wondering if you knew how to get hold of Renata Scott," Ira said, deciding to just come to the point.

"I do," Watson said, sighing. "But it won't do you any good, I'm afraid."

"What do you mean?" Ira said, leaning forward. Madame Blavatsky indicated her displeasure with this shift by extending one paw full of claws gently into his leg. He leaned back again.

Watson paused, and Ira could hear her scratching her head. "I mean that Renata isn't at home right now. She hasn't been for a couple months at least. I tried calling her when it occurred to me that people were being mind-altered, and her robots told me that she was gone."

Ira slumped and tried to hide his disappointment by petting the cat. He was always behind the eight-ball on these things, that's why he was a crappy third-line superhero back when, and why he was a stupid old man now. How could he have thought that Watson could help them? She might not even be telling him the truth now -- she might be hiding Renata's information because she'd been controlled herself, or maybe because she couldn't trust a stupid old man with the information, or any of a hundred reasons he could think of. He put his face in one hand, trying not to let miserable tears roll down his cheeks.

There was a long silence, and he fancied he could feel Watson looking at him. Finally, she said, "You're feeling it, aren't you? The ridiculous miserable feeling? We're in the middle of some sort of... focus of whatever is going on. It hit Simon the hardest, as you... felt. He can barely take human form any more. And I don't know what happened to Megan." Her voice broke over Megan's name.

Ira rubbed his face hard. She was right. He was being ridiculous. He felt terrible. Even his joints ached more than usual. "What the hell is going on?" he murmured. "You've got to get out of here."

"Simon tried moving out," Watson said, so sad and defeated-sounding that Ira wanted to cry again. "He said the feeling caught up with him, and started in on everyone around him. I suppose it could be following Simon -- he was pretty high-profile there, with doing that queer variety show and that guest appearance on Glee and everything."

"Suzanne missed him when he went off to film that," Ira said. "Oh, god, you haven't heard what's happened to Suzanne."

"Simon told me she forgot him," Watson said, her voice gone flat. "Just... forgot him one day. That was when he stopped even trying to be human."

"What's going to happen to all of us?" Ira said in a small voice, laying his hand on the warm purring cat.

"I don't know, Ira," Watson said. "I really don't know."

They sat in dejected silence for a while, until Ira finally remembered to take a sip of water. He said, "Will you come to one of our little get-togethers? We could use your brain."

Watson started to say something, then stopped, paused, and said, "I don't think I'd better. I'm afraid I might bring... unwanted attention down on you all. But if there are things you think I can do and you can ask in a coded sort of way, feel free to give me a call."

"What if you... forget?" Ira said, fighting down the uncontrollable wave of disappointment that her refusal brought him.

"Another good reason for me to not get involved, no matter how much I want to," Watson said. "If I suddenly turned into a Stepford Wife wannabe like Megan, I'd be a terrific liability."

"Ah," Ira said, running his fingers gently over the tiny cat's pointy spine.

The cat said, "Prrt?"

"I'm sorry," Watson said. "I just... I don't even feel comfortable visiting my sister right now."

"No, your reasoning makes perfect sense," Ira said. He flopped a little helplessly around the cat, wondering what to do about her. "I should leave you to your work."

Watson silently rose and scooped the cat from his lap. The cat said, "MWAH," indignantly, and Ira could hear little claws going tick-a-tack on the hardwood floor.

The next few moments were awkward, as Ira tried to get out of the chair himself and failed, despite his invulnerable and still super-strong muscles. The depth of the chair and the angles just foiled him, and finally, he mutely extended one hand, fighting down the wave of unreasonable humiliation it brought him. Watson helped him up.

As they passed down the stairs to the second floor, Ira heard footsteps trudging slowly up from the first floor. "Hey, Watson," that person said. Ira thought the voice was vaguely familiar. Then she added, "Oh! Ira!"

"Lizzie?" Ira said, pleased and astonished. "Tin Lizzie? I haven't seen you in a dog's age."

"Ira?" Lizzie said. "Oh, god, I can't... you can't..." She didn't take his hand, didn't step to meet him. He got a whiff of cigarettes and beer.

"Lizzie, Ira can't see you," Watson said patiently. "It doesn't matter you're in your PJs, okay?"

"I... oh. I'm... I'm working the late shift these days, I'm sorry, Ira," Lizzie said hurriedly, and took his hand. At least her handshake wasn't limp and characterless.

"No worries," Ira said, trying to put the young woman -- the woman who had looked nothing at all like his long-gone wife, but who had reminded him of her in some strange way for a time -- at ease. "I was just leaving, but maybe I'll run into you sometime."

"Yeah," Lizzie said, relief filling her voice. "Yeah, that would be great. You look good, Ira."

"Thanks," he said, letting Watson guide him past her and the awkwardness between them after all this time. "The old bones keep on moving. Take care."

"You too," she said, a little wistfully, but he heard her open and shut her door.

Outside the front door, Ira said, "So she's the one living in G's apartment."

"Yeah," Watson said.

"How is she doing?"

"About as well as you might expect," Watson said. "I've tried to get her to move -- she's nowhere near as high-profile as Simon was -- but she's just... sticking it out, I guess."

They continued on to the bus stop in silence. As Ira heard the bus pulling up the road, he turned to Watson and pressed her hand. "You call if you need anything. Or someone to talk to. I don't have much to do but listen these days," he added, trying to lighten the moment.

"Oh, Ira," Watson said, pressing his hand back, "thank you."

Early post because I'm sure other folks need other things to think about today. I sure do.

“At least we didn’t have to be dunked,” said Christopher, examining the granite slabs that made up the walls.

“Shut up,” said Tom, seated on the stone floor of their prison, chin determinedly on her fists.

“Seriously,” said Christopher, accidentally nudging Tom with his foot as he squeezed past her. “Did you see what was in the wat--”

“SHUT UP,” said Tom. She swatted irritably at his leg.

“I suppose,” said their once-upon guide from his rickety wooden stool against the wall, “It would be in bad taste to say ‘I told you so,’ so I won’t.”

“It would,” said Tom. “And besides, you didn’t. And besides, coming here was your idea."

“I told you not to trust me.”

“No, you didn’t,” protested Christopher.

It was too dark now to see the saturnine man, but Tom could hear the rustle as he moved, and a sigh. “Well, I’m an OBVIOUS villain-prototype, if you chose to trust me, it’s your own fault. We’re not reliable, even with the best of intentions. Everyone knows that.”

“Did you stab the Dean just because you’re not reliable?” snapped Tom.

“No,” said their erstwhile guide, somewhat sadly. “I had an irresistible compulsion. It might have been that it’s been a while since I stabbed anyone in the back, but it came on so quickly that I’m more inclined to think it was Her.”

“Godmother?” whispered Christopher.

“Shhhh!” hissed the villain-prototype. “I have told you and told you that she has ways of listening!”

“Even here,” said Tom. “D’you think she’s the sword?”

“Almost undoubtedly,” said their long-ago guide dryly. “Or, rather, She is speaking through it, as a sort of telecommunication device.”

“It’s a cell phone?” asked Tom, bewildered.

“It’s a palantir?” asked Christopher, horrified.

“Your archaic language, while doubtless poetic, is of no use in the present conversation,” replied the almost-villain with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “It’s a sword that She is... able to use to listen and speak through. Is that clear? Given that the President seems to be in the habit of consulting it...”

“Does that mean these... freedom fighters are just another little scheme of hers?” Tom was surprised by how disappointed she was.

“That would seem to be the case, yes.”

Christopher said, plaintively, “What for?”

“I’m not as worried about that as about what’s likely to happen to the Dean,” said Tom.

“It does seem as though Herself has a particular animosity to your friend,” said the part-time villain.

“The Dean thought so too,” said Tom, just as the heavy wooden trapdoor which opened into their basement was lifted. Tom could see the flare of a torch.

A smoky voice with the broadest Scotch accent she had ever heard said, “Are any of ye doon there hurt?”

“No,” said Christopher. He was, to give him credit, at least a little wary.

“Gude. Hang on a wee minute.”

They stared at each other (as best they could in the dark) and then a rope ladder fell down from the beams surrounding the trapdoor. “Up ye get,” said the voice.

Tom seized the ladder. Climbing up was a lot more difficult than rope ladders look in the movies. She could hear Christopher complaining on this theme behind her and their once-guide hissing something impatient.

Above ground, it seemed to be very late. Only a few torches burned outside tents, and the air had the flat, chilly taste of the wee hours.

Their rescuer -- if rescuer she was, Tom thought -- hushed them and started to lead them away towards the edge of the camp. Tom thought about asking questions, but then considered: what could possibly be worse than sitting in a dark basement waiting for the President of the Wartime Republic to decide on their punishment?

When they had gone a little way into the woods, they met a small group of people. There was a mutter, and then someone opened up a lantern (it actually had a flame in it, Tom noted peripherally). Their rescuer stuck out a hand, “I’m Iona mac Cormaic, and I am weel pleased to meet ye. Come along, we’ve a safe place for ye.” Tom blinked.

“What about the Dean?” asked Christopher. “She wasn’t being kept with us, we need to rescue her too!”

“Och, aye. She’s the one told us where ye were.”

Tom, meanwhile had been examining their companions, who closely resembled the Merry Men and Women. “I’m pretty sure I saw you at the feast,” she said to a woman whose red hair was streaked with gray and bound in braids around her head.

“That you did. I’m Mor McKellan,” she replied, “But all you see here are safe bind, lassie. Come along and see fer yersel’.”

They followed their small group of rescuers into the woods, passing several points where their new friends had to exchange passwords with guards hidden in the shadows and behind trees. Finally, they emerged into a clearing where the grass had been trampled down, and perhaps a hundred people were sitting in a circle around the clearing, on blankets. Many had little candle lanterns, so the effect was of a midnight picnic.

As they approached the circle, a tall, familiar androgynous figure stood up and approached them. “Dean!” said Christopher.

“I see Iona and Mor got you out safely,” said the Dean.

“Och, weel, all it took was a wee dram to their guard,” said Iona. “‘Twas quick work.”

“He’s mickle young to be on his feet all night, that one,” said Mor. “He’ll naught tell of a pretty lassie and a cup of something, eh?” The two of them laughed and looked at a third, younger woman, who laughed as well.

Tom whispered to Christopher, "I thought we had some sort of instant-translator thing."

Christopher shrugged, wide-eyed. "Maybe it can't understand them either."

“Where are we?” asked Tom more loudly, trying not to be plaintive.

“That’s a thing,” said Mor. “Tis with us you are.”

Iona seemed to understand the implied question, and added, “This, then, is the true revolution, lassie. We call oorselves the Web. I’m mostly a Marxist; Mor here is a folloower of Freire, and I’m dommed if I can pronoounce it.”

Mor laughed. “You didn’t take the Republic seriously, did you?”

I kind of like this leaping lightly from one cliffhanger to another.

“Well,” said President Arrowheart pleasantly, as she approached with a cadre of what looked like bruiser bodyguards but were probably a cabinet of ministers. Tom and Christopher, who had been staring, morbidly fascinated, into the water, looked up at her. “Shall we get this started? Best for all concerned, I think.” She stepped up onto the wooden platform which held the dunking stool and drew the black glove off her right hand, then drew her sword.

The Dean, who had put her coat on for the occasion, said, “Let’s not faff about. I’ll go first.”

The President seemed about to agree, but then set the sword blade down in front of her and put her palm on the pommel. There was a brief, awkward silence, and she said, “No. The young man goes first,” in a curiously flat voice.

Christopher shot the Dean a terrified look. The Dean frowned and stepped toward the platform. “There’s no reason,” she began.

“The Light of Freedom states that the young man should go first. Then the young woman. You, you will endure last,” said President Arrowheart, still in that flat, no-nonsense tone.

“What the hell is the Light of Freedom?” asked Tom of no one in particular. She cast another sideways look at the water. No one else seemed to find its contents surprising.

“Don’t you know?” murmured a woman in tattered leathers standing next to her. “That’s the miraculous speaking sword. The President carries it and interprets its wisdom to us.”

Tom went cold. “Dean!” she shouted. “It’s Her!”

The Dean, however, seemed already cognizant of this. She leapt for the platform and for the sword. For a few long moments, it seemed as though the sheer surprise and audacity of it would carry her through: she wrested the sword away from the President and seized Eleanor’s wrist. The Dean yanked Eleanor's hand around to display the pattern branded on the palm to the gathered crowd. The strange angular marks glittered in the sun.

They stood for a moment like that, staring at one another, the Dean gripping the sword in her off-hand, Eleanor glaring defiance at the Dean. Their black coats billowed in the morning wind.

Then the ministers closed on them, dragging the Dean away from Eleanor.

Eleanor Arrowheart pulled her black glove back on and turned her back on the crowd.

Wonder City will be returning by November, because I'm mostly through my other work, and I'm missing the gang. If we're not done with the Dean by then, we will continue to run Compass Rose to the completion of this episode, posting on Fridays.

Daylight did not improve the encampment. It was clear that nobody bathed, except possibly Eleanor Arrowheart and definitely Fuki-no-tsurugi (how else did he keep that golden hair of his so clean?). Christopher and Tom were sitting on logs beside a smoky fire, bereft of breakfast, caffeine, and temper, when the Dean emerged from the low tent opposite theirs. She looked nearly immaculate, although she had not bothered with the tailcoat.

The Dean said, “Breakfast?” pleasantly enough to them.

“Porridge,” said Christopher, in a tone of voice usually reserved for “Stomach flu,” or “Finals.”

“I think perhaps not,” said the Dean, and walked briskly off. When she returned, she was followed by a rather dazed-looking young man, who set down his tray of mugs, gave her a slightly hostile look, and departed. The Dean sat down and picked one up. The fragrance of coffee drifted to Tom’s nostrils, and she snagged one.

“How do you do it, Dean?” asked Christopher, sighing luxuriously into his coffee.

“Common sense,” replied the Dean dryly. “Ah, here comes breakfast.” A young woman approached with a tray of something which definitely was not porridge.

“What do you suppose this ‘Trial’ thing is, anyway?” asked Tom, opening a small earthenware jar to discover that it contained some sort of jam.

“Well, it’s either trial by combat or trial by fire. Since they’re looking to see if any of us are, shall we say, contaminated, I’d guess it’s trial by fire,” said the Dean, putting a slice of bread on a stick and holding it hopefully over the smoky fire.

“I... don’t much like the sound of that,” confessed Christopher. “Do you think we can get away?”

“You’re perfectly safe,” said the Dean composedly. “It’s me they’re after.”

“What?!?” said Tom, nearly dropping her mug of coffee.

The Dean raised an eyebrow at her. Tom glared.

“No, wait, I don’t understand,” said Christopher. “How do you know? Dean, if you’re in danger, we should leave! Now!”

The Dean examined her toast, turned it, and held it over the fire again. “I don’t think that’s necessary. Besides, if we leave, you won’t get to find out what happens.”

Christopher looked deeply upset. “That’s not as important as keeping you safe!”

The Dean looked at him as though she would very much like to put him in his carrier and give him back to the shelter. “There is no such thing. Now eat your breakfast.”

The Trial was not by fire, but by water.

Whatever Tom had expected, a classic witches’ dunking stool had not been it. She was conscious of a slight disappointment -- it seemed relatively banal. It lacked panache. It was, in short, faintly ridiculous.

The crowd around the dunking stool did not help, as their ragged clothing and mud suggested a comedy sketch rather than a serious trial to Tom’s mind. Still, while she wasn’t relishing the idea of getting dunked, at least it didn’t look lethal. Uncomfortable, certainly. Still, it lacked the ruthless expertise of CIA interrogators and their forms of watery persuasion, right?

At least, it didn’t look lethal until she glanced down into the water.

On time this week!

“It wasn’t his fault,” said the Dean, scratching absently under the clumsy bandages.

“Like hell it wasn’t,” Tom growled.

“No, your friend is right,” said President Arrowheart from her position at the head of the long set of tables set up in front of her tent. “Poor bastard’s just a construct, can’t help the way he’s wired.” She smiled at Tom and Tom’s ill mood relented just a little.

“What have you done with him?” asked Christopher, looking dubiously into the dark depths of his leather mug.

“He’s having a fine time being broody in the dungeon. Don’t look at me like that,” she added when the Dean raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s just a ruined basement. Really, quite his style and not damp at all.”

A tall, exceedingly blond young man dressed in brown and green leathers stood on the bench halfway down the first table and shouted, “I propose a toast!”

Eleanor Arrowheart put her chin in her hand and looked nearly as cynical as the Dean. “Here we go again.”

The very blond, very young man shouted, “Death to the fascist Puppet Master! Smash her circuits and take back our freedom!” There was a cheer after this toast -- not exactly half-hearted, but not exactly a full roar, either.

“What was that about?” asked the Dean.

“Oh, that’s Fuki-no-tsurugi. He’s bucking to be the next Hood. Elections are next month.”

“The next what?” asked Tom, while Christopher coughed at the eye-watering stuff in his flagon.

“The next Hood. We lost Gwynedd ap Hood a couple of weeks ago -- a raid gone wrong -- so campaigns are on just now. Fuki-no-tsurugi is up against Hakim al-Walid and Mor McKellan, but neither of them is campaigning as hard as he is. They’re both older and better known. And know better,” Eleanor added with a wink.

Tom asked, while Christopher blinked, “You elect Robin Hood?”

Eleanor Arrowheart, Wartime President of the Republic, said, “Of course. We want no inherited titles here. All our important positions are elective. Or decided via single combat, of course.”

“Of course,” said Christopher weakly.

A young woman wearing pale-blue silken pants, an embroidered coat which did not leave very much to the imagination, and a belt of silver disks, swayed up to the top of the table and whispered in Eleanor’s ear. The President nodded curtly, then stood up. “You must excuse me,” she said. “I have something I must see to. I shall be back shortly. Please, enjoy yourselves.” With that, she turned and vanished into her tent.

The young woman in blue silk and spangles mingled with people who were getting food and wine, and disappeared into the torchlit night.

“What was that all about, do you suppose?” Tom asked Christopher, who shrugged.

About twenty seats down, someone at their table started a rousing song about battle and honor and drinking beer. Tom put her head in her hands and sighed.

An hour or so later, when the song was about hedgehogs and she was seriously starting to consider joining their saturnine guide in his peaceful dungeon, President Arrowheart appeared again, leaping out of her tent, running to the table, and jumping upon it in a crash of crockery.

“Jeez, what is it with the jumping on tables--?” started Christopher, but was interrupted.

“My people!” shouted the President. “I have been vouchsafed a sign!”

The feast went silent, all faces turned to the woman in the long black leather coat. Tom noticed peripherally that her right sleeve had been rolled up nearly to the elbow, revealing a well-muscled arm, and her coat was unbuttoned just enough to show the top of some intriguing cleavage. Eleanor’s eyes glittered, and in one hand she held aloft her sword, pommel up. It glinted in the torchlight in a most improbable way.

“A vision!” She wasn’t shouting, but her voice was clear in the silence. “We must welcome these stranded Guests as our own. They will join us and fight for the victory of freedom!”

A pause. A few indrawn breaths, as though the audience were about to cheer, when Eleanor went on. “But first, they must be tested by the Trial, for one of them is choked round with Godmother’s foul wires! I have seen it! We must hold the Trial! I have spoken!”

She leapt down from the table (with fluid grace, of course) and stalked into her tent.

“The fuck?” inquired Christopher.

“I thought she was kind of normal,” said Tom, feeling unreasonably disappointed.

The Dean sighed and propped her head on her hand, elbow on the table. “Perhaps you need to re-evaluate your standards,” she drawled. Tom turned her head away and blushed.

Sorry for the lateness. Viral bronchitis rattling my brains.

Everything was very muddy and all the women were showing rather a lot of bosom. A considerable percentage of the -- Tom couldn’t help thinking of them as the “ragtag band” -- were smoking something which did not smell of tobacco. Their rags still looked like renfaire clothing.

Christopher leaned as close to Tom as his ropes would allow and whispered, “Why do they all have English accents? Did you notice that?”

“Shut up, you,” growled one of their captors, and shook Christopher roughly. Tom bit her tongue.

They slogged through the ankle-deep mud of the central “road” of a very... heterogenous tent city composed mostly of muddy canvas and sheepskins. It smelled of woodsmoke and cowpats. Tom did not see any cows.

Women and men were sitting around sullen fires, cleaning swords and doing something obscure to arrows. They all paused on their work to stare at Tom, Christopher, the Dean, and their woebegone guide. Their captors did not pause but took them to the largest tent (white with red piping, but splattered with mud like the others) and shoved them inside without ceremony.

The inside was floored with dusty but expensive-looking carpets and there was a heavy oak table occupying the center of the tent, surrounded by benches and chairs. Tom had the irrelevant thought, If they move camp often, isn’t that a bitch to carry? and then had her attention arrested by the person sitting behind the table, who was lean, elegant, and dressed entirely in black leather from neck to high-booted foot.

The person behind the table removed her boots from said table and sat forward in her (naturally) thronelike chair. “What’s this, then?” she inquired.

“Spies of the Puppet Throne, boss,” said one of the Merry Men.

“Um, actually, we were guests,” said Christopher.

“Excuse me,” said their once-guide.

“And not on purpose!” added Tom hastily.

“Er,” said their guide.

“We kind of ended up there accidentally,” said Christopher.

“If I may say a word,” said their quondam guide.

“I guess it was my fault...” said Christopher.

“Not really,” said Tom. “It was Rosamund.”

The Dean cleared her throat. Tom and Christopher turned to look at her.

However, no one else did.

“Really,” drawled the Boss. “Well, I have to say you don’t look like very efficient spies to me.”

Their ersatz guide cleared his throat. Everyone ignored him as well.

“Untie them,” ordered the woman in black leather. “They can’t possibly be spies.” She stood up and dusted off her long jacket. “Welcome to the Republic of Sherwood. You can be our guests now.”

“Um, thank you,” said Tom, as one of their captors used a knife to cut her bonds (what was wrong with just untying them? waste of resources).

“My name is Eleanor Arrowheart,” said the woman in black without a trace of embarrassment. “I’m the elected Wartime President of our Republic. Please, sit down.” She sat back down herself and thumped the table with her fist. “Wine,” she ordered curtly, over her shoulder. “We’ll be having a communal meal tonight and you are welcome to join us.”

Tom sat down next to Christopher. The Dean remained standing, rubbing her long wrists thoughtfully. Tom wondered how she managed to keep her cuffs so clean.

Christopher asked, “How did the, um, Republic start?”

“Many years ago,” said President Arrowheart, staring off over their heads while one of the Merry Men arrived with an unlabeled bottle. “When the Park shut down, a number of Guests were stranded here. They were scattered all over the Kingdoms, of course, and a good many of them died, strangled in the web of Godmother’s stories. But there were a group of friends here who fled into the forest and founded the first band of freedom fighters, the Merry Men and Women. Soon, word spread, and humans all over the Lands started journeying to join us, despite the dangers set by Godmother in their path. And today, here we are, still fighting. And someday, we will defeat her!”

She threw back her pewter mug, drained it, refilled it, and stood, holding it aloft. “To Godmother’s downfall!”

All the Merry-makers echoed, “To Godmother’s downfall!”

Suddenly, their former guide cried out, “The enemy is within the gates!” He produced a knife from under his tunic and stabbed the Dean in the back.

There was a sudden scramble and flurry. Tom and Christopher knelt by the Dean, who looked rather surprised, while the Merry Freedom Fighters restrained their former guide and helper, who meekly submitted to their grasp.

“Dean, Dean, are you all right?” gasped Christopher. She turned a slightly irritated look on him.

Tom turned to their former guide. “How could you? What were you doing?”

He sighed. “And every tale condemns me for a villain. Although in my case, it does so for pretty good reason.”

Tom stood up, her hands automatically pushing up her sleeves.

The saturnine man hung limply in the grasp of his captors. “I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul. I did try to warn you.”

Tom’s punch knocked him clean out of their grasp and onto the floor of the tent.

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Wonder City Stories

May 2013

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Wonder City Extra: Soundtrack of Renata's Captivity (so far)
Wonder City Stories III #18
Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 20
Wonder City Stories III #17
Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 19
Wonder City Stories III #16
Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 18
Wonder City Stories III #15
Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 17
Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 16
Wonder City Stories III #14
Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 15
Wonder City Stories III #13
Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 14
Wonder City Stories III #12
Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 13
Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 12
Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 11
Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 10
Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 9

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Wonder City Stories

Superpowers are the least of their problems

Recent Entries

Wonder City Extra: Soundtrack of Renata's Captivity (so far)

Wonder City Stories III #18

Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 20

Wonder City Stories III #17

Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 19

Wonder City Stories III #16

Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 18

Wonder City Stories III #15

Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 17

Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 16

Wonder City Stories III #14

Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 15

Wonder City Stories III #13

Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 14

Wonder City Stories III #12

Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 13

Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 12

Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 11

Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 10

Compass Rose, an Interlude: Once Upon a Time, part 9