Talyesin's Tales

Previously on Squirrelman: Sins of the Past:

After many long hours of fighting crime following the breakout of the inmates of Bendis Correctional and the Kane Sanitarium, Squirrelman and the Crimefighters' League were summoned to the Mayor's Office.

Having determined the methods whereby the Department of Metahuman Affairs' Protected Registry was hacked into and the data therein subsequently posted to the popular datasite Maskwatchers, Doc Sterling revealed his suspicions as to the identity of the person responsible: Kosmos Konstantinopoulos, Reed's elder half-brother...




Starring:

Matt Mattheson ......... as Squirrelman
Kimmy Sinclair ................ as Ragdoll
Rick Duncan ........................... as Ace
Lisa Dumont ................... as Physique
Anna Kimble ................. as Darklight
Stephanie Cooke ............. as Blue Jay
Jay Allen ........................ as Red Bolt
Mike Washington ............. as Dragon
Trevor Andrews ............... as Phenom
Jessica Wagner .............. as Rapunzel
Katie McCormick ............ as Superia
Hank Scott .................. as Powerband
Wayne Masters ... as Midnight Avenger
Jill Suzuki ........................... as Naiad
Hannah Cohen ................... as Psifire
Kyle Drake ........... as Troubleshooter
Jackson Archer ............ as Moonbow
Alistair Crombie ............. as the Mole
Cricket ............................... as herself

with

Reed Sterling ....................... as Doc
Julia Sterling ................... as herself
Joe Sterling ....... as SuperTwin Red
Jerry Sterling .... as SuperTwin Blue
Jeannie Sterling .............. as Zephyr

and

Mayor Elizabeth Ross-Carter ... as Maiden America


"What?" Rick asks.

"No, wait," I say, then, "WHAT?!"

Reed gives me a look that shuts me up fast.

"Kosmos is the product of what once would have been called one of my father's 'indiscretions'," he explains. "Dad claims he never knew. Mother certainly never did, thank God. It would have killed her."

"How did you find out, Doc?" Kimmy asks gently.

"I met him. When I turned eighteen I spent a year exploring the world, having adventures, you know, between doctorates. Seeking knowledge in books and research is all well and good, but I wanted first-hand knowledge of the world outside academia. I mean, I had of course had my share of adventures, but-"

"Doc."

"I met him in a bazaar in Hong Kong. I was having some difficulty with the local dialect and he kindly stepped in and pointed out that due to my inflection I was calling the roast chicken I wanted to buy a roast mother. Naturally I thanked him and offered to buy two roast mothers and share. He graciously accepted my invitation and that how our friendship began. We had some wild adventures that year, I can tell you! He was brilliant and had a nearly foolhardy courage to him. A year my senior, yet he never made me feel junior to him. Even then his charm could disarm the most precarious situation. Claimed to be descended from Greek nobility."

"Waitaminute, he's older than you?" I ask. "Doc, I sat across from him. He doesn't look a day over fifty."

"And I certainly do look my age," Doc answers, running a hand over his bald head. "You've heard the story that he visits a special Grecian spa? Not just special, magical. But I'll get to that.

"We had been adventuring together, two boy geniuses, seekers of knowledge, advancing the boundaries of science, for about... six or seven months. Aboard a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean, we were celebrating the defeat of Doctor Pierre Gustav Toulomb, the insanely brilliant bio-chemist, whose plans to sell chemical weapons to the world's foremost dictators Kosmos and I neatly foiled. Kosmos almost never drank, but that night, for whatever reason, he chose to imbibe. As a friend, I joined him, thinking that I could turn the conversation toward the reason of his unusual urge to partake of the grape.

"As it turned out, he was more than willing to tell me. He was drinking, he said, because he always drank a toast on that evening, every year. Something his mother had taught him. In celebration of the father he'd never known.

"This was a shock, naturally. First of all, Nikos Konstantinopoulos was a well-known Greek industralist. That Kosmos was claiming not to know his father's identity was something scandalous. Understand, this was in the mid-sixties. People didn't speak of their bastardy.

"Kosmos explained that before she met the man whose name he carried, his mother had a torrid love affair with an American adventurer. The American had fled like a coward in the middle of the night, never to be seen again.

"When I asked Kosmos for the cad's name, he just smiled at me. Such a cold smile. I'll never forget it."

"Doesn't reach his eyes," I say, remembering. "I've seen it."

Reed just nods, then says, "Kosmos raised his glass to me, and said, 'My American father's name, you ask? What matter? He took what he wanted from my mother and left her... me. I have no desire to meet such a coward.' When I pressed him for the name, he became angry with me, and finally said, 'You want to know, Reed? You desire so badly to seek information that you will pry into a man's personal affairs?' I of course began to apologize, but he was having none of it.

"'Fine,' he said. 'So be it. On your head shall this knowledge weigh. My father, my American coward father, is named Buck Sterling.'

"It weighed on my head, alright. Like a tonne of bricks."

Julia puts an arm across his shoulders from where she's sitting on the chair's arm, but Reed shakes it off and stands, crossing the room to the window. Jeannie looks stunned. I guess we all do.

"It took me a year to work up the nerve to ask my father about it. Dad was never approachable about personal matters. When I finally did... It was like he... shrank. Diminished, somehow. Dad claimed that the woman, Kosmos' mother, had laid some kind of spell upon him, drugged him, he didn't know what. Dad was a man of action, not intellectual curiosity. He never met a problem that a whack with a hammer or a slug from a .45 couldn't fix, he used to say. Anyhow, Dad claimed he'd been seduced by this woman, a Greek beauty named Circe. She was supposedly able to trace her family back to the Circe of Homer's Odyssey. She told my father that she had inherited her ancestor's magical powers."

"That's why you dislike magic so much?" Jeannie asks her dad quietly. "Because a Greek witch seduced Grandpa?"

"Kosmos' tale sparked my research into magical matters, trying to make sense of the nonsensical, and ultimately led to my piercing the veil into Avalon and meeting your mother," Reed says, turning away from the window. He gives us a wry smile and says, "It seems if the Sterling men have a weakness, it's women who wield magic. Dad, myself, Joe... I don't dislike magic. I just don't understand it. And what I don't understand... can be dangerous. To me, and to my family."

"Cassie doesn't wield magic," Jeannie says.

"Her powers are magical in nature, sweetie," Julia explains. Kimmy nods.

"Wow," Rick says. "So... what? You and Kosmos became enemies after that?"

"Not right away, no," Doc answers. "But it was hard to recapture our former trust. And when it came time for me to go back to school, a... coldness had developed between us. He had kept it from me all those months, you see. If he had been forthcoming from the start... and, well, he saw me as the spoiled, beloved, legitimate son. Nothing further from the truth, mind you, except my legitimacy."

"Your father was very proud of you," Julia says sternly. "He told me so himself."

"But he never told me, did he?" Reed answers with that wry smile again. "After that, Kosmos and I fell out of touch. I didn't really hear from him again until a few years later, when I read that Greek industrialist Nikos Konstantinopoulos had died suddenly. Fell off his yacht during a violent storm, drowned. Kosmos inherited everything. Six months later he brokered a deal with a German consortium and Praxis was created."

"So... what makes you suspect he's behind the datahack?" Steve asks.

"For the last thirty years I've seen all manner of plots and schemes devised by him. Foiled more than a few, if I do say so myself. And never, not ever, has there been anything that led back to him directly. I know he's behind them all... but I can never prove it. He's smarter than I am. He knows what I'll look for. Knows which kind of experts I might call in. Plans accordingly. He's too good," Reed explains, shaking his head in wonder. "That's why I suspect him of orchestrating the datahack."

"But-"

"It's late," Julia decides, and she's right. "We've all had a very trying week, and it's not over yet. We can continue this in the morning."

"Oh shit," I say. "I nearly forgot. Tomorrow morning the League has been summoned to appear before the Mayor."

"Uh oh," Doc jokes. "Official recognition. That's never good."

"That's what I'm worried about."

"And we've still got to go down to the Living Complex's secret lab and deactivate Project Solstice," Reed says. "I assume you've found Dr. Hi-Q?"

"In a manner of speaking," Kimmy says. I explain what happened.

"I'll want to have a look at the corpse. Micro-bombs planted in an agent's brain? Sounds like one of Kosmos' tricks, alright. At least Troubleshooter has scans of the biometrics," Doc says. "Showdown, Ace, you're both welcome to spend the night."

"No thanks, Doc," Ace says. "I've got a place to crash."

"So do I," Steve adds.

"Where're you guys staying?" I ask.

"This restaurant in Chinatown, Mr. Lee's House of Ideas," Steve says. "Great Chinese food. And Mr. Lee is blind, so he doesn't know I'm a mask."

"You, Rick?" Kimmy asks.

"Well, uh..." Rick blushes. "Anna's got a spare room. Offered to let me crash there."

"Really," I say, trying not to smirk.

"Yeah, you know," he answers. "What?"

"Nothing," I say.

"Not a thing," Kimmy adds.

"Whatever," Rick says with a grin. "Okay. See you guys in the morning?"

"City Hall, eight ayem," I say.

We say our goodbyes and goodnights and head to bed. Kimmy and I have a lot of sex to catch up on, so after an absolutely relentless session, Kimmy asks, "What do you think?"

"That counter-clockwise thing? Worked for me."

She hits me with her pillow.

"About Reed and Kosmos, you doofus."

"I think forty years is a long time to hate someone."

"Could be clouding his judgement, you mean?"

"No... more like... colouring his perspective."

"What's the difference?"

I don't really have an answer for that. And I'm exhausted. I'm pretty sure I fall asleep around then.

Next morning comes way too quick.

We get up, shower and dressed, cracking jokes and laughing. Nice to see Kimmy laugh. Damn I love that woman. We have breakfast with the Sterlings - Jeannie's got an early class, the twins are just coming in from helping with wreckage from the crime spree, Julia and Reed are always up early. Jeannie is not a morning person and doesn't take Kimmy and my banter too well, sulking into her coffee. Conversation pretty neatly avoids last night's revelation.

By seven, we're good to go. Lisa swings by to pick us up and we're out in the morning air.

I love dawn. The city looks amazing from the air at dawn. Normally I see it after a night of patrolling, so dawn always has a sense of ... a job well done. That I've made a difference.

En route, I put out a call over the nanobead, reminding everyone where we need to be. Everyone checks in okay, even Hannah. Good to know the docs at Williams General are on the ball.

We show up at City Hall, all Neo-Classical marble columns out front, glittering steel-and-glass quasi-art-deco high-rise out back. The Mayor's office is the entire top floor. The security guards give us the hairy eyeball, but our ID cards are the real deal, so they've got to let us through. We're escorted by an aide who doesn't introduce himself to the Mayor's Office, asked to wait and to not touch anything.

Her Honour's office is very well decorated, classy with a capital C. There's a wall of awards she's received, and only about half of them are from her mask days. There's a portrait of her, back in the day, when she was part of the U.S.Aces, with her team.

"You should get a costume like that," I tell Kimmy, nodding toward the portrait. Maiden America's costume was mostly missing, all stars and stripes and good intentions, red white and blue, a gold shield that was molded to look like a stylized bald eagle.

"In your dreams," Kimmy smirks back.

"Who's this?" says a firm voice from the doorway.

It's her. Her Honour the Mayor of Action City. Still as gorgeous as she was in the painting. Dark hair from her mother, blue eyes from her father. Out of nowhere a mindflash gives me a piece of trivia - Maiden America's mother wasn't American, but Brazilian, descended from some Roman Caesar. Accounts for her colouring. Tall, easily as tall as I am. Dressed in a blue pants suit. Hair up, no-nonsense stylish. Stunning.

"The Crimefighters' League, Mayor," the aide explains.

Mayor Ross-Carter turns to her aide.

"I thought they were masks," she says. "Famous ones. Phenom, Superia, Squirrelman."

"I'm Squirrelman, Mayor," I say, stepping up. Stick out my hand to shake hers.

She looks at me.

"You're Squirrelman," she says. "You changed your costume. Why?"

"Well, the Maskwatchers site- "

"You changed costume because your secret identity was revealed?"

"Well... yeah. Didn't seem much point-"

"Your costume is your face, Squirrelman. It's how you're known. It's how you're recognized."

"Madame Mayor, thanks for your concern," I say, hackles up. "We'll take it under advisement."

She shakes my hand, giving me a little nod. Looks like I passed the test, whatever it was this bitch was testing.

"So," she says, heading for her desk. She barely looks at us, putting on reading glasses and signing the papers her aide is putting in front of her as we talk. "The Crimefighters' League. I understand you've been doing some good over the past few weeks."

"We do what we can," I answer.

"Good, good. I'm told you're looking for a new headquarters."

"Bad news travels fast."

"Well, bad is a matter of opinion. What's bad from one perspective could be seen as opportunity from another."

"Like war profiteers."

That got her attention. She was famous for busting war profiteers and weapons smugglers during Vietnam. She looks at me, gives me a little raised eyebrow.

"Indeed." She goes back to signing papers. "Action City is grateful for your efforts in these troubling times."

"What, the whole city? I suspect the folks we've been putting behind bars aren't so grateful."

She gives me a cold, polite smile.

"Squirrelman, let's stop bandying words, shall we?"

"Oh yes, let's."

"Action City is in need. Yes, the whole city."

"What kind of need?"

"Our police force is sorely in need of powered officers."

"You've got a whole bunch of powered officers. And every non-powered officer has a uniform that augments his or her natural abilities to nearly powered levels."

"But our powered officers are... shall we say, lost, amongst their non-powered colleagues. The ACPD needs a public face for its powered officers."

"Okay."

"A public face like the Crimefighters' League."

I look at Kimmy and Rick.

"Really."

"Yes, really."

"You're offering us, what, a job?"

"Exactly."

"You want us to become cops."

"No. I want you to officially work in tandem with the police. I want the Crimefighters' League to be officially affiliated with them."

"Reporting to the Chief of Police?"

"Reporting to the Police Commissioner. And myself."

"So, what do you get out of this?"

"What do you mean?"

"We get a new state of the art headquarters, police backup, and I'm assuming some kind of paycheque. What do you get?"

"An entirely powered branch of our police department."

"What else?"

"That's not enough? Let's face it, Action City has... special needs, in terms of crimefighting."

"No, I suspect there's more."

"The collars," Kimmy says.

"I'm sorry?" Mayor Ross-Carter says.

"Who gets the collars?" I ask.

"As members of the Action City Police Department, the collars would naturally-"

"Be given to the Crimefighters' League, with the assist going to the ACPD?" I finish for her.

There's a pause while she considers it, looking me square in the eye. Maybe a second or three pass.

"Naturally," she says finally.

"I'll have to discuss it with my team," I say.

"Of course."

There's another long pause. She looks up.

"Well?" she asks.

"Sorry, Madame Mayor, can we have a little privacy?" I ask.

I can almost hear her teeth grinding from where I'm standing. The aide looks aghast. I swear. I've never seen someone look 'aghast' before, but this guy has it down cold.

"Fine," she says, standing up.

Something twitches at me.

"Look out!" I yell, pulling Kimmy to the floor.

The windows shatter behind the Mayor. She turns, not hurt, and an energy bolt blasts her where she's standing, sending her flying through us to crash into the wall opposite.

Laughter from outside. Deep, satisfied laughter.

Hovering in mid-air, dressed in gold and black, cape billowing in the wind, energy crackling from his fists and his eyes.

Baron Zero.