Danny and Kristogar paused silently. Raising one hand with his palm flat, Danny brought Tobias to a stop a few metres behind them. Before his hand was fully lowered, Tobias was standing directly in front of him.
“Mxy…” Danny said softly and carefully.
”Sure. Why not,” Ktl replied, a grin spreading wide across his face.
“How’re you.”
”SUPER! And you? How are you Danny Hearn and Kristogar Velo and Tobias Christopher and little bunny rabbit?”
Danny looked down. A small rabbit sat near them. It looked up curiously, then ran quickly across the grass and out of sight.
“We’re fine…” Kristogar replied.
Inside the mausoleum that stood imposingly behind the four teammates, Rose and Mimic of Project Omicron stood near the doorway, being careful not to make any noise. Mimic was cradling a wrapped bundle in his arms, holding it tightly against his chest.
Mimic peeked silently out through the slightly ajar doorway.
“Four of them. From the museum. One’s large and shiny,” He said softly. Rose nodded and said nothing in response.
As Mimic watched, his face altered and became an approximation of Danny’s. He grinned as he did this, as if mimicking Danny was something he did not as a strategic necessity, but just to amuse himself. He was mocking his would-be adversary.
Rose reached her arms to the holsters located beneath her shoulders, and pulled from there two silver handguns. She gripped them tightly, and ran the barrel of one of the guns slowly along her cheek.
Outside, Ktl hovered above his three teammates. They stared back at him, not knowing quite how to handle the situation. While they had their suspicions, they couldn’t yet be sure. They didn’t rightly know who it was, hovering there above them with the fate of them all in his hand.
But now… they had to assume the worst.
One thought more than any nagged at the back of Danny’s mind. Mick hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t said ‘Mxy’. He hadn’t said ‘Ktl’. Whatever being it was staring back at them… could enter this world through Mick’s body any time it wished.
Danny stepped forward.
“Who are you?”
”Why… I’m Mxy,” Ktl replied. He grinned at them again, and crossed his legs in mid air. Danny got the distinct impression that he was being toyed with.
“Bring Mick back.”
”Shant.”
Danny repeated his command. “Bring. Mick. Back. Now.”
”Mick, Schmick! Stick! Prick! Lick! Banana!”
“Banana doesn’t rhyme with Mick,” Danny said.
”It rhymes with Ramana!”
“That’s not a real world! You just made it up!”
”It rhymes with Guyana!”
“…fine!”
“Getting sidetracked here…” Kristogar said. Danny nodded.
“Why won’t you bring Mick back?” Danny asked.
”Don’t want to. Don’t need to. Might need to fight.”
“Fight who?” Tobias asked, looking up anxiously at the being he’d thought, until moments ago, to be one of his trusted teammates.
”Fight them!” Ktl said, and pointed to the crypt entrance. Mimic had come running out, clutching a bundle wrapped in cloth close to his chest and running off into the nearby foliage. Directly behind him came Rose, stepping slowly out of the doorway and holding her two handguns aloft.
“Tobias. Guy in trenchcoat. Carrying what might be book. Go,” Danny whispered.
”No running on the grass…” Ktl mumbled.
Tobias raised his leg to step forward, and found he couldn’t. The air around him seemed to thicken around him, holding him in place. It slowly got thicker, harder. He felt as if he was immersed a gel, solidifying in the space around him. He panicked as he realised he couldn’t run. It was the one thing he was always good at. He began to have trouble breathing.
“…Tobias?” Danny said. TC just wheezed in response.
The roof of the crypt was a secluded place, shrouded in darkness. And up there, surveying the scene, sat the member of Project Omicron known only as the Sheik. As he looked down, he could sense great power. Great magic. Particularly from the floating one… there indeed was a being with influence.
The Sheik muttered something softly and inaudibly. Or he may have just been breathing out loudly. It was hard to say. But in any event… he was trying his hardest to cast a restricting spell on the power of the being he saw before him.
With a start, Ktl found his influence on the world around him waning.
This was the effect the Sheik was after.
What the Sheik may not have been able to predict, though, was that this would free Tobias.
And before he even fully realised what had happened, Tobias Christopher bolted off into the trees, following Mimic.
Danny and Kristogar, however, still found themselves staring down the barrels of Rose’s twin handguns. She held them firmly in position, locked on the two heroes’ faces. Rose cast a sideways glance into the trees as Tobias ran off, quicker than she could fire at him. But she remained still and silent. Her priority now was to keep these two occupied.
Rose had faith that Mimic could handle himself.
Kristogar looked her up and down, and said, “Hey… weren’t you in Stormwatch?”
Rose just glared at him in reply.
“Right. Never mind then…” He said.
Ktl was having a problem. Tobias had broken free of his hold, and now he was having trouble making things explode in horrible and violent ways. Which was something he really wanted to do right now.
Someone… somehow… was casting some sort of counter spell on him. Restricting his magical influence. Ktl was not impressed.
Ktl pushed with all his willpower against the opposing force. If he was being honest with himself, he could have to admit that it was a power that almost rivalled his own. But he was not in a mood to be honest with himself.
But the thought had entered his head. It nagged at him. Something out there was quite possibly as powerful as him. He’d taken care of Mxy, he didn’t need some new magician on the block moving in. It rankled.
But the force of a fifth dimensional magician is not to be underestimated, and not to be trifled with lightly.
Ktl guessed that whatever it was had something to do with the strange lady in front of him. So he pushed at her. And at her weapons. And he thought hard at her.
So then, before Danny and Kristogar’s eyes, Rose was thrown backwards and her guns were both turned into flowers.
Somewhere across the cemetery, in the centre of a garden full of leafy trees that surrounded the resting place and gave it a certain sense of isolation, Tobias had caught up with Mimic. He ran alongside the trenchcoated man, reached out his arm, and yanked the cloth bundle from his grip. All this happened before Mimic even realised he was being followed.
They both stopped, and shared a momentary glance at each other. Tobias was startled to see Danny’s face staring back him. Taking advantage of this momentary distraction, Mimic dived back through the trees and scaled the stone wall.
For a moment, Tobias was tempted to chase him. It would only take a second. But who know what kind of magical defenses these guys had? After all, he thought, it must have been one of them who cast a spell on him before, slowing him down. Must have been.
The book was the top priority right now. Scores to be settled later.
Tobias ran back to where he had left Danny, Kristogar, and what may or may not have been Mxy. He found them staring down at the woman who held them at bay earlier, clutching flowers. She dropped them to the ground, then got up and ran. A smoky trail followed her down from the roof of the crypt, and enveloped her. An astute eye would have noticed to shapes in the smoke, but that was hard to judge in the darkness.
“Should I…?” Tobias began, pointing towards them.
“No. We have more important things to deal with.” Danny tried not to cast a glance at Ktl as he said this. “And we may need you here. Remember… the book is top priority.”
With that, Tobias handed the cloth-wrapped bundle to Danny, who unwrapped it. Inside, he found… A newspaper. No book. No Liber Vitae. Just a newspaper.
“What the…?” Danny said. Kristogar looked at it.
“It’s in Italian,” Velo said.
“Can you read it?” Danny asked.
“Some.”
Kristogar took the paper from Danny, then began to read. After a moment, he closed his eyes and suppressed a laugh.
“What? What is it?” Tobias asked.
“It’s an Italian newspaper. It’s an article about a break in at the museum. Some meta thieves who got away from the cops in a giant hovercraft…”
Danny didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.
“Those bastards. It’s a bloody decoy…” He said.
In all this, nobody noticed the other Project Omicron member, Pneuma, as he crept silent out of the crypt with a leather bound book in his arms.
[ 03-03-2003, 10:45 PM: Message edited by: Danny ]
