Talyesin's Tales

Previously on Squirrelman - Sins of the Past:

Squirrelman, Ace and Ragdoll witnessed, in their civilian identities, the team called TeenSupreme arrest a group of powered criminals called the Masters of Disaster, which was made up of Thunder Axe, Inferno, Speed Freak, their leader Powerhouse, Phantasm, Jailbait and Wildebeest.

Squirrelman and several other costumed crimefighters took on the powered criminals called Nightzone's Crew, led by voodoo magician Nightzone, and comprised of Patchwork, Siren, Gremlynn, and Phantasm. Most of Nightzone's Crew were arrested, but Phantasm eluded capture.

In one of their first cases as a group, the Crimefighters' League found, fought, and arrested three more powered criminals called Phantasm, of whom there are thirteen versions.

When the inmates of both Bendis Correctional and the Kane Sanitarium were released in the biggest prison break ever orchestrated, Crimefighters' League member Superia was attacked in her secret identity by Phantasm.

While requesting special dispensation from Bishop Powers for Blue Ghost to marry them, Squirrelman and Ragdoll witnessed a vid call from a Spanish Cardinal, who instructed the Bishop to grant the dispensation, explaining his intervention in the matter as a miracle.



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
Wayne Masters ... as Midnight Avenger

Guest-starring

James Grayson ............ as Blue Ghost

with

William Wrightson ..........as Poltergeist

and introducing

Lilith Moreau ................. as Goth Ghost
Barbara Jean Taylor .... as School Spirit




Kimmy and I found Blue Ghost in Weirdsville, naturally. On the way we tried to stop a vampire from feeding, only to be yelled at by his so-called victim for ruining her trick. Vampires paying prostitutes for their blood. I hate Weirdsville.

He was on the edge of Gaines Forest when we found him. It was a sunny day, in Action City. Here on the edge of the forest, leaves falling, bare branches poking like skeletal fingers at the cloudy sky, no sun in sight.

"You want me to marry you both?" he asks, in that creepy hollow echoing voice, his lips not moving.

"Would you?"

"It would mean a lot to both of us."

"And you say... you say Bishop Powers granted the dispensation for me to perform the ceremony?"

"Under the direction of Cardinal de Ybarra," I tell him, and what once were his eyes go wide, little pinprick blue stars flaring bright. "He called while we were there, told Bishop Powers to grant the dispensation."

Blue Ghost looks stunned, then smiles at us both.

"It would not only be an honour, and my privilege, to marry you, it seems it once more is my sacred duty to do so," he says.

"Excellent," I say.

"Thank you so much," Kimmy adds. "If there's anything we can do for you-"

"There is, actually," he says. "There is something that I have put off for too long, a task that will require considerable aid."

"Name it. The League's at your disposal."

"Not the League. Perhaps Anna, your friend Ace. But definitely the two of you."

"What is it?"

"Phantasm must be stopped, once and for all."

"Really," I say. "I hear the only way to do that is to bring all thirteen of him together."

"That's correct."

"And all thirteen of him are currently on the loose," Kimmy adds.

"Also correct."

"Let's do it, then," I say.

"I was hoping you'd say that. Contact your friends, tell them to meet us here."

"No need, James," Anna says, stepping out from behind a tree. Ace is behind her, looking confused. He looks over his shoulder, pointing to something that's not there. I know the feeling.

"You just knew to be here?" I say. She just smiles a little smile that says, Of course.

"What's the sitch, son?" Ace asks me.

"Putting Phantasm down, for good."

"And I will just... ah. Here they come now," Blue Ghost says.

Three other people - two girls and a really skinny guy - slowly appear. Materialize is I guess a better word. Both of the girls have dark circles under their eyes, and deathly pale skin. One of the girls is blonde, dressed like a cheerleader; the other, hair dyed black, in black jeans and a black tank top. Neither of them looks cold in the late September air. The guy I've met before - dressed in grey tights and a tattered grey cloak, full face mask - Poltergeist.

"These are... my wards, for lack of a better term," Blue Ghost explains. "This is School Spirit, and this is Goth Ghost."

Goth Ghost, the brunette, rolls her eyes. School Spirit smiles a sad little smile.

"You're both... um... dead?" Ace asks.

"Not quite," Poltergeist answers. "They've been phantomized, their bodies turned into ghost forms. Part of an experiment by the True Path - trying to figure out a way to get into heaven without actually dying first. Blue Ghost and I put a stop to it, but not before the girls were transformed. We're helping them adjust."

"I see," Anna says. "And finding Phantasm will help them do so?"

"Right," Poltergeist says. "Hopefully by examining the process of remerging Phantasm we can figure out a way to revert the girls' ghost forms into normal human bodies."

"We're right here, you know," Goth Ghost says, her voice hollow and echoing, like Blue Ghost's, but at least her lips move the way they're supposed to. "And you could call us by our names, not those stupid costume names."

"Oh I dunno, they're kinda like neat, you know?" School Spirit says, same hollow echo in her otherwise cheerful voice.

"Whatever," Goth Ghost says. "Look, my name's Lilith, all right?"

"Okay, Lilith, fine," I say, then I turn to Blue Ghost and ask, "How do you want to proceed?" but he just defers to Poltergeist.

"Phantasm has a particular ... scent, you might say," Poltergeist explains. "Pertaining to his aura. With your ability to detect danger, Squirrelman, and our various abilities to sense auras, if Darklight were to metaphysically link us, well, we should be able to track all thirteen of Phantasm down."

"Anna?" I ask.

"It's possible," she says.

"Okay, let's do it," I say.

"James, it might be better if we called in the Spellings," Anna says.

"Not at all, Anna. I have every confidence in your abilities."

"Very well."

Darklight gets us to stand around her, in a circle, even Ragdoll and Ace. Then she starts turning around, pointing at us each in turn, pulling something from us, some kind of ectoplasm I guess, tying it all together, weaving it, and then lets go, lets it return to the person it came from. When she's done, I'm sort of hyper-aware of the others. Not the same as when we were trapped in the Kane with the other founding members of the Crimefighters' League, not that deep, that primal - more like, aware of what they're aware of.

"Where do we head first?" School Spirit asks.

"The first place Phantasm ever appeared," Blue Ghost says. "Charlton Cemetary."

We, all of us, turn our heads and just... know... which way the Cemetary is. Through Gaines Forest. We head through the Forest, aware of every... Thing... in the Forest, knowing somehow how alive the Forest is, how aware it is of us, that we're intruders here, unwelcome, uninvited. We get through the Forest as quick as we can, avoiding the Things that don't want us here, until we emerge again in the Charlton Cemetary.

The Cemetary... well, let's just say I was happier without these new senses, showing us the Things that wait, the Things that lurk, the Things that hunt... the spirits of the departed holding them back, an eternal battle. Good thing there are so many ex-masks and ex-metas buried here, I guess. They say there's no peace for the wicked, but sometimes I wonder if that doesn't hold true for the righteous, too. Talk about depressing.

"Okay, so..." Ace starts to say, but we all know where to go from here.

We find the grave, go right to it. Richard Zorba, 1942 - 1979. He was a two-bit thief and a petty crook, shot by the ACPD during a robbery gone really wrong. Turned out he'd been working for COVEN, and they didn't take too kindly to failure, so they brought him back to life... thirteen times.

"It's here," Blue Ghost says.

"It really happened right here, huh?" Ace asks, checking the grass growing on the grave. The second he touches the ground, we all feel it. Zorba's aetheric signature. Ace stands up, and we all look in the same direction simultaneously. Anna and Blue Ghost set up an Invisible Box on the grave site, and we're off.

We find Phantasm in the basement of a rare book store in the middle of Weirdsville. The book store manager and her assistant are cowering in the back room, terrified beyond rational thought. School Spirit's able to calm them down while the rest of us take on Phantasm. His nightmare illusions aren't any fun - seeing Kimmy being torn to shreds because of an order I gave Anna to boost Poltergeist's telekinesis is definitely number one on the Things I Can Happily Never See Again list - but we manage to get through them and shut him down. Anna sends him through to the Invisible Box. As soon as that's done, the unmistakable aetheric scent leads us to another Phantasm.

It's like that all afternoon, right into the evening. One after another, we track down Phantasm and send him back to his grave. We even manage to track down some other folks as well - Nightzone's Crew, the Masters of Disaster - and wind up making some legitimate collars on the way. Decibelle was right, turns out - the ACPD are not happy with masks.

"At least it's not just us," Ace mutters to me and Ragdoll after we watch Poltergeist get a hard time from a bunch of cops, for taking the collar on the Masters of Disaster arrest.

"I guess," I say.

Everything goes pretty much smoothly, which is to say, nobody gets seriously physically hurt, though some of the fights are pretty hairy, and we're pretty sure to have nightmares from some of the things our collective fears let Phantasm create illusions of, it's pretty straightforward, except the fights get tougher as it gets dark and moon starts to rise.

Until the last one.

The last one is a no holds barred, knock down, drag out fight. The nightmare starts before we even find him, that's what trips us up, because he's expecting us, the thirteenth Phantasm, he's more powerful than all the others combined. Putting them all in the Invisible Box transferred their power to him, the last one, near as we were able to figure out afterwards. It's a bitch from the beginning.

We're travelling along the rooftops of Weirdsville when the Spellings show up, all four of the sisters. They heard about our collars and want to help. We let them join us for the last one, what the hell. The thirteenth Phantasm is under a vampire hotel, halfway to Downtown. Great. So we go down. The vampires attack us, we fight them off, Althea Spelling gets hurt pretty bad, Alicia helps her back to the surface to get help. Holly Ween shows up with Jude Azael to help. We get Downtown, no sign of the Phantasm... but we find the Crimefighters that I sent to find the Mole. Turns out the Mole is working with the Prince of Thorns, has been all along, and now Midnight Avenger, Troubleshooter, Moonbow, Nightwoman, and Psifire are all dead, killed by Cricket and her ganger friends, working with the UnSeelie redcaps. We fight the Mole, Cricket, and the others, Ragdoll winds up killing the Mole, Holly Ween gets killed by Cricket, Alexandra - Hex, whatever name she's going by today - she kills Cricket. To stop the redcaps, Anna casts a spell, only it goes bad when Jude kills Ace, claiming he's always loved Anna and no one else can have her, so Anna freaks. Blue Ghost has to stop her, only that goes wrong too, and she dies. That's when the other twelve Phantasms are released and they attack, killing Poltergeist, Goth Ghost, and School Spirit, and Blue Ghost goes utterly berserk, growing to a thousand feet tall, destroying Downtown and Weirdsville, going on a rampage that destroys half of Action City, killing half the Crimefighters' League, most of the Sterling Squad, and all of the Weirdsville Nine. In the end, as we're standing in the rubble, Phantasm appears and kills Kimmy and Missy and Max, rips them in half. Blue Ghost defeated, nothing stands in the thirteen Phantasms' way, and they destroy the rest of the city in an onslaught of blood and terror the likes of which can only be imagined as the very worst of Armageddon.

Good thing it was only a nightmare.

We get through the nightmare because of one thing and one thing only - Ace is good with electronics, and he sets an alarm card to go off every five minutes, breaking Phantasm's hold on us. We jump him before he has a chance to slam us with another illusion. We can't risk a sending so Darklight and Blue Ghost slap an Invisible Box around him, and we escort it back to the Charlton Cemetary, where the other twelve Phantasms are stuck in the same box, all trying to get out, banging, screaming, merging all together. We slip the thirteenth Phantasm in, and suddenly it all goes bright white light, all thirteen become one, and they slide into the ground, gone.

"We did it!" School Spirit cheers, jumping up and down in midair. Lilith rolls her eyes.

"And based on what I just witnessed on the astral plane, I have a very good idea where to proceed in order to help you girls regain your physicality," Poltergeist says.

"Looks like we done good, son," Ace says to me.

"Sure does feel good, huh?" I say.

"Sure does," Kimmy says.

We say our goodbyes and Anna severs the link that's tying all our senses together, which feels good, like coming home, but also suddenly lonely, too. The four of us head back to the mansion.

"Where have you guys been?" Lisa asks when we walk into the main lounge. "We've been trying to reach you all day."

"Really," I say, checking my nanobead. Looks fine. "We've been busy."

"We caught all of Phantasm," Ace explains, all proud.

"That's great," Wayne says. "Unfortunately we have some troubling news."

"What?" I ask, not liking the sound of this. "What's happened?"

"The Claremont Act," Steph answers. "It's been repealed."