A moment after Captain Midnight's demand for help, Doug shook himself out of the strange trance that the leatherclad woman had put him and the others into. He had been made to relive all the pain he'd gone through when many of his friends and adopted family had been murdered over recent years. Now he was pissed off. The woman was unconscious, but the powerful tattooed man still needed to be taken down.
“I'll help ya!” Doug yelled, instantly shaking off his stupor as he reshaped his hands, one into a huge hammer, and the other into a large anvil.
As the tattooed man got back up to his feet, Doug swung his now-heavy fists at each side of the man, crushing him between his hammer fist and his anvil fist. But it was too much for the damaged underground chamber to take.
“Doug!” Quinn shouted, his nearly spent silver energy barely glowing at all now. “The chamber's going to collapse on us! You've got to do something!”
“Already on it, chief!” Doug yelled, his fists shrinking back into humanoid hands even as his back expanded rapidly, and he grew taller, becoming a web of support columns to keep the chamber from imploding.
Doctor Marvelo knelt down to the unconscious woman dressed in leather. “We'd best keep this little minx sedated, eh wot?” At that, he pulled a small vial of chloroform from a pocket, took a handkerchief out of another, and—dousing the handkerchief with chloroform—placed it over the woman's nose and mouth. She stirred for a moment before falling under the effects of the anesthesia.
“Do you always keep a bottle of chloroform in your pocket, Marvelo?” asked Quinn, who bent over with his hands on his knees, completely exhausted.
Marvelo grinned slightly and rose his right eyebrow. “It's important for a gentleman to be prepared for any eventuality, is it not?”
Captain Midnight, who had knelt down to inspect the unconscious tattooed man, remarked, “Call me crazy, but I think these two were sent after us.”
“I guess, but...” Quinn paused in reflection. “Wait, that doesn't make much sense. They had to have been hiding from us before we even got here.” He turned to the Reptile. “Jason—do you know anything about these two?”
Jason Thomas said nothing for a moment, his face slowly becoming more lizardlike as he furrowed his brow. “What are you trying to say? You think I had something to do with this?”
“No, I just—”
“Fuck you!” he yelled, erupting in rage once more. “This is MY place! This is MY home! You think I'd want a bunch of... a bunch of FREAKS like you coming in here and destroying it?”
“Hey, pal,” Doug said, still in the shape of support columns, “we ain't yer enemies, here. We just wanna know what's goin' on.”
“We're friends, Jason,” said Quinn.
“I'm the Reptile!” Jason shouted. “That's what they all called me back home! That's what I am now. Don't call me Jason!” The young man completed changing into his full reptilian form and stood shaking with rage for another few moments. Finally, however, he fell to his knees and broke into a weeping fit. It was as if he was at last able to let go of all the resentment, anger, and betrayal he had kept bottled up inside him for the last five years.
“It's OK,” Quinn said. “We're with you now. You've got a new family with us, if you choose that.”
Jason continued to weep uncontrollably.
***
An hour later, the MBLers had finished checking the underground chamber carefully.
“Jolly good!” Doctor Marvelo said suddenly, breaking the tense silence. “It seems to have sustained no major structural damage. We stopped the tattooed brute before he could cause any permanent damage.”
“What are we going to do about these two?” asked Captain Midnight.
“Just keep the woman sedated,” Quinn said. “We can't allow her to awake just yet.”
“And the big lug?” asked Doug, who stood over the tattooed man.
Quinn shrugged. “If he begins to stir, just knock him out again.”
Jason Thomas had calmed himself down by this time. He was in his human form again and looked embarrassed at his earlier emotional outbreak. “I'm... I'm sorry about earlier. It was just—”
“No need to explain, dude,” said Quinn. “We've all experienced pain recently.” The MBL leader closed his eyes for a moment as he remembered the pain he had felt when he learned that Deborah had been senselessly killed while he was in a coma, and that he could do absolutely nothing about it now.
“Still,” began Jason sheepishly. “Well, I—I'm still a bit wary of you guys, but... I want to trust you.”
“That's all we're asking, friend.”
Jason looked down for a moment, furrowing his brow as before, this time in thought. He looked back up at Quinn, who waited silently for him to say something. “Hey, do you guys want to see something?”
Some minutes later, Jason had led Quinn Stevens and Doctor Marvelo—Captain Midnight and Doug had stayed behind to watch over their still-unconscious attackers—down a long tunnel that they had entered through a construction shaft. Nearing the end of the tunnel, Jason held his finger up to his lips to indicate them to remain silent, and motioned for them to douse the flames from their makeshift torches.
The tunnel went dark for a moment, but as the MBLers' eyes readjusted to the dim light levels, they realized that it was not completely pitch black as they had expected. There was something glowing at the end of the tunnel.
“Follow me, but be careful,” Jason whispered. He turned and ducked through a hole on the left of the tunnel's end, from which the dim light emanated. Both of the MBLers followed him through the hole.
Quinn involuntarily gasped in shock as he peered over the edge of a huge chasm, and golden light shone over his face.
“My word,” Doctor Marvelo remarked. “Well, that's quite interesting, isn't it?”
The MBLers had discovered the secret that lay beneath Promethean City. It was another, much older city, and it was populated by strange-looking humans wearing a variation of ancient Mayan dress.
