Chapter One

By Steve Seinberg

They slid their two keys into the twin keyholes on the ornate panel before them, and then the beautiful blonde and the bare-chested man with wings pronounced the inductions official. Three new holograms flickered into life amid the thirteen others already floating above their heads.

It was the blonde who spoke. "Dee Tyler...Ryan Kendall...Ray Terrill...you've all proven your skills and heroism and resourcefulness time and again as members of the Freedom Fighters, and we are honored to have you join us now as full-time members of the Justice Society of America. Speaking for my co-chairman, Hawkman, and myself – Phantom Lady, Black Condor, and the Ray – we now formally welcome you to the JSA!"

The pronouncement was met with much applause by the various costumed men and women arrayed around the enormous conference table, and from there the meeting relaxed a bit, with the stiff sense of formalism transforming into a more casual and exuberant feel, complete with back-slappings, high-fives, vigorous hugs, and cool-guy, fist-banging handshakes. All in all, there were sixteen heroes now comprising the ranks of the Justice Society, and only the beautiful blonde who had been leading the meeting – one of the most well-established heroes of all, the legendary crime-fighter called the Black Canary – saw one of their number slip away. Only the Canary saw their graceful physician, the cloaked and cowled detective and medic known as Dr. Mid-Nite, silently take his leave. She did her best to keep the frown from her lovely features as she congratulated young Ray Terrill on his induction into the ranks of the first, and arguably still greatest, assemblage of costumed heroes the world had ever known.

"We're thrilled to have you, Ray," she said, making some slight effort to project her voice over the general boisterousness of the gathered throng, although of all of them, she had the least difficulty making herself heard when she wanted to do so. "After we heard that Uncle Sam had disappeared, and the Freedom Fighters had officially disbanded, we jumped at the chance to get some of you on board. Hanging in with the JSA can be a tough gig..." she said, her eyes straying again to the door through which Dr. Mid-Nite had departed.

"But somebody's gotta do it, right?" the Ray grinned, his teeth all but gleaming like facets of a disco ball.

"You got it," agreed the Canary, tearing her eyes from the doorway, and looking back at the joyful, red-headed young man. "Somebody's got to do it. After all...there are some pretty terrible people out there..."

Mr. Terrible knocked at the very unassuming-looking door.

He was a bit of an eyesore, this Terrible fellow. He was what was known colloquially as a 'super-villain,' and for his own specific motif, he had decided to reference two of his opposite numbers, two 'super-heroes' who worked under the name 'Mr. Terrific' – the original hero to bear that name had been a World War II-era fighter in a bright red and green get-up that would have seemed utterly ridiculous had its owner, one Terry Sloane, not been one of the planet's very top specimens in terms of brain power, muscle power, and raw, natural athletic ability. Sloane had been deceased for over a decade now, but his example and exploits had inspired a spiritual successor of sorts to adopt his codename, and his slogan of "Fair Play" – Michael Holt was considered one of the two or three most intelligent humans on the planet, and was also an Olympic decathlete, as versatile and formidable as Sloane had been, and most likely even a bit more so. Holt had updated the Mr. Terrific outfit for the new millennium, however, and what had once been a green jacket, red tights, and a sort of maxi-ski mask had been turned into what looked like high-tech leather, cast into shiny pants, a form-fitting shirt with a Nehru-style collar, and a matching leather jacket, all in black, gray, and red, and instead of the full head-mask, Holt bore a strange cluster of nanite technology all across his face in the shape of a broad capital letter "T."

For his part, Mr. Terrible had decided to ape the fashion stylings of the current Mr. Terrific in terms of the cut and content of his uniform (although whereas Holt always looked immaculate, Mr. Terrible's clothes generally looked torn and scuffed, like he'd just been coughed up out of a wood-chipper), but for whatever reason, Terrible had opted to use the red and green color scheme once employed by Terry Sloane. He also emulated the opaque capital "T" that Holt wore on his face, but whereas Holt's was of cutting edge nanotechnology that served various functions, and was removable at its wearer's discretion, Mr. Terrible's "T" was a crudely drawn tattoo. Holt's T was sharp and crisp and jet black, looking like it had been applied using a machine-tooled stencil that was the very model of precision, all edges and corners and perfect right angles; Mr. Terrible's "T," on the other hand, was ragged and sloppy, with broken borders and uneven shading, and gave the overall impression that it might have been applied by a wobbly speed-freak on the back of a moving bus. If nothing else, however, it did lend Mr. Terrible a certain imposing and intimidating air, especially to civilians. Not that he felt especially imposing or intimidating at the moment…

Terrible wasn't usually the nervous type, but if you asked him right now, and could somehow get the truth out of him, he'd have admitted to more than a few butterflies. He was here to meet a character known as the Key. This, in and of itself, didn't make Mr. Terrible nervous – goony crooks with fetishes for costumes and code-names were his world – rather, it was the fact that the Key had transformed himself from the deranged but physically normal human being he'd started out as, into something that was clearly not human any more. Not really even all that close.

Whatever he'd been at one time, after extremely liberal, self-prescribed doses of various psycho-active chemicals of his own invention, the mad-but-human scientist had mutated into a tall, stringbean-y drink of toxic water and apparent ill-health that capered instead of walked, leered instead of looked, had white, pupil-less eyes, and long stringy hair sodden with natural grease and oil, and where his old human self and its fellows at their best had five senses through which to observe the world, the Key's home-brewed compounds had left him in a state in which he currently enjoyed no less than eleven distinct senses. All that, and the nut also carried around a big key-shaped blaster-weapon that could put a hole through an entire city block. Mr. Terrible had seen some photos and footage of the Key, and watching the guy just pass a few words with an interviewer was enough to send frostbite up and down the old vertebral column.

And this was to be his new employer.

Mr. Terrible swallowed, and knocked at the very unassuming-looking door again, and this time it opened...

"Look, Pieter, we have to talk about this!"

"There's nothing to discuss. Everything is fine."

"Everything is not fine! You won't even look at me anymore, much less spend any time around me. You won't work with me, you won't refer to me as anything but 'the Black Canary' anymore, you won't say my real name – we can't go on working together if it's going to be like this!"

"You're imagining things."

"Oh, is it my guilty conscience, just conjuring up all of this stuff, Doctor, is that it?"

"I never said anything about guilty – I don't know of any reason why you'd feel guilt."

"Neither do I – I have nothing to feel guilty about!"

"Good. Guilt is stressful. You don't need it."

"Look, Pieter..."

Approaching footsteps hushed the conversation.

"Ah, good. Dinah...just the person we were looking for. Hello, Pieter."

"Carter. Michael." Carter Hall, the winged icon known as Hawman, and Michael Holt, the super-genius self-designated Mr. Terrific, each nodded in turn at Dr. Mid-Nite as he greeted them. The tension between Dinah Lance – the fabulous Black Canary – and Dr. Pieter Cross, was practically a visible special effect strobing through the space between them. "Well," said Mid-Nite, "I really need to go check up on Nemesis and get her latest readings. I'll leave you generals to your war-council." With a flap and rustle of his cloak, he was already halfway down the corridor, and receding quickly.

"Pieter..." The Canary let him go, but didn't look happy about it at all. "Dynamite timing, guys."

"Dinah," said Michael. "I understand how you probably feel here, but as difficult as it is, you need to just give him his space for a while. The man is in pain, and he's also not all that keen on acknowledging that right about now, and I actually can't say that I blame him. You trying to force him to do that is not the way to help the situation."

"Well what, then? What do I do? We can't work together like this! He's on my squad, and I can't even get him to be in the same room as me."

"Michael's right," said Hawkman. "He needs his space. He needs distance from you, Dinah. You didn't do anything wrong, we all know that – I'm sure even Pieter knows that – but none of that makes it any easier for him. He needs to not be around you for a while. And that actually feeds in to what we wanted to talk to you about."

Michael Holt nodded. "Now that a few of the Freedom Fighters are on board, and we have an even sixteen members, we have a proposal for restructuring the team...and one of the elements of the new subdivisioning system is that Pieter won't be on your squad anymore. Carter and I have talked it over at some length, and we agree that this will be for the best. At least for the time being. If you try to force anything with him now, Dinah, we'll lose him completely. Plain and simple."

"We're agreed on this, Dinah, like Michael said. We don't want to disregard your own thoughts and feelings, but in this particular matter..."

The Black Canary closed her lovely blue eyes, and ran one gloved hand back through her long blonde cascade of hair.

"Okay," she said, eyes still closed. "Propose away."

"Dr. Psycho speaks rather highly of you," the Key purred, while twirling one long greasy hank of hair around one long greasy finger, "and this is impressive, as Dr. Psycho generally doesn't speak very highly of anyone save himself. You apparently made quite a showing in your time as his bodyguard."

"Not really one to brag..." Mr. Terrible scratched idly at his stubbled chin. "But his body did stay guarded, that's just the plain truth."

The Key grinned a sort of audible grin – he didn't actually make any sounds that could have been construed as true laughter, but Mr. Terrible understood instinctively that this extra wide grin served the strange man as his own version of chortling. "Indeed. Although a real stickler might point out that Dr. Psycho doesn't present much of a target to begin with, being all of about a meter in height and with all the strike-zone presentation of a college freshman's little in-room refrigerator...but then again, Psycho's enemies would have little difficulty with even a tiny fraction of that kind of target opportunity. And besides, I am not myself seeking to employ a bodyguard anyway."

"No, I know. Psycho said you were looking for an op who could snatch a guy for you, and swipe some kind of...well, key. More short-term gig than open-ended hired muscle stuff. More...finite."

The Key grinned that carnivorous-looking 'laughing-grin' again. "Yes, quite. An excellent word, 'finite,' don't you find?"

"Uh, yeah, it's the ginchiest. So this guy, the one you want snatched...?"

"Ah, yes. Perhaps you have heard tell of him – he goes by the name Prometheus."

The large opaque capital letter 'T' across his face rather effectively obscured his features from view, and made his own expressions often difficult to read; however, like with the Key's predatory laughing-grin, it was sometimes clear what his mood might be...like now, for instance, when he was obviously pleased.

"Prometheus? Let me tell you something, Key-man, it's funny you should mention him...'cause he now bounces at this real exclusive club – like, for super-crooks, see – and I've been getting invites to show there for the last few months. Haven't really had much of a reason to go and blow a bunch of my free dollars until now, but if that's the guy you want me to grab...well, it sure as hell won't be too tough to find 'im."

The Key's eyes glittered like polished scythes. "Well, I am getting a good feeling about this after all, my friend, although I must admit that you were starting off with some up-hill convincing to do – it needn't leave this room, but I generally find Dr. Psycho to be as ineffectual as he is obnoxious, and it was more a general boredom that led me to check out his recommendation rather than any kind of faith in his judgment. But come, let us compare notes...I think we may indeed be able to do business together, as it turns out..."

Mr. Terrible took a seat...

Amelinda Lopez was moving so fast that she was out of a given room before the breeze of her passing could even make itself known. Grinning, she could hear staffers shouting their protests as she dashed piles of papers to the floor in her wake, blew money from countertops, disheveled hairdos, and flapped clothing vigorously about. None of these things were her primary aims in racing through the corridors of the House, but they also never failed to give her a nasty-spirited chuckle, either.

The House was a gambling operation, pure and simple. The twist was that it catered to the super-villain community exclusively, by abducting low-level super-hero types, and then forcing them to fight to the death in gladiatorial-style contests in various gaming environments while invited super-villain guests wagered large amounts on the outcomes. The mistress of the House, a mysterious woman known only as Roulette, had learned the hard way that it was generally best to keep the emphasis on the "low-level" when forcibly drafting in her participants; a couple of visits by members of the Justice Society had each resulted in almost total devastation of the House when the heroes had broken free from Roulette's mind-control mechanisms and severely trashed the facility. Roulette had responded by both realigning her recruitment parameters, and by bringing in some full-time, live-in security...hence, Amelinda and her teammates.

The lightning-quick Ms. Lopez, also known by the godawful, albeit illustrative, sobriquet of Touch 'N' Go, was part of a small cadre of antiheroes known collectively as the Hybrid. All had originally been normal humans who had suffered some kind of horrible accidents, and all had been rescued by a man named Steve Dayton – one of the wealthiest men on the planet – when he had been at the height of a rather intensely delusional fit of mania that saw him infusing the metal promethium into the victims' systems in an attempt to not only save them, but to also bring about the advent of extra-human powers and abilities in the subjects, that they might then be drafted into his own private army. Dayton's work resulted in much success in terms of bestowing those so-called super-powers, and given that Dayton was also the extra-human telepath known as Mento, he had also been able to exert some fairly complete mental domination over his subjects, whom he dubbed the Hybrid (as they had become hybrids of organic human matter and the rare promethium metal). Amelinda herself had been one of only two out of the original seven Hybrid members who had been a criminal even before Steve Dayton had come along with his mind-bending Mento helmet and forced them to commit various atrocities in his name, and as such, had required the least in the way of mental tampering. So again at the House...

Roulette, like Dayton, was a firm believer in the value of mental control. She had on retainer a frail, goblin-looking individual she called Tap, who had within his array of abilities, the powers to temporarily limit or even fully remove a given subject's access to his or her own super-human abilities, and could also affect the moods and thoughts of those he focused upon. Ever since they had first been snatched up, leaderless after the death of Gorgon, their de facto chieftan, the Hybrid had been subjected to regular sessions of psionic reconditioning by Tap at Roulette's direction, rendering them completely loyal to her, and to the well-being of the House. She and Tap had found that Dayton's original tampering left them even more susceptible to mind-control than the average super-powered citizen would have been, and they had proven on multiple occasions to be extremely effective as bouncers and soldiers. And once again, as one whose make-up gravitated toward the criminal end of things anyway, Amelinda required much less in the way of Tap's tender mercies than did her teammates. As a result, Tap let her slide on his "treatments" more than the others, a fact he never lied about to his employer, but which he also didn't voluntarily address if she herself didn't initiate such a discussion – it just saved him time and energy, that was all, and he knew Touch 'N' Go actually liked life at the House. Her work on-site gave her regular opportunities to make use of her super-speed, and of her beloved ability to touch an opponent, and thereby leech away their kinetic energy and abilities, adding them to her own for a limited, but highly enjoyable time.

Amelinda was, by nature, a thief...but she also enjoyed a good brawl, and given her speed, she also liked serving as courier. She didn't even mind being the bearer of bad news if she had to be, so long as she could rock people's little worlds, and bearing good news was even better...hence, her high-speed jaunt this morning across the House's grounds.

"Roulette! Roulette!!"

She slammed to a halt in one of Roulette's many control rooms, where her boss was watching proceedings on a large view-screen that depicted Tap getting up close and personal with a fierce-looking Japanese man – working his mind-numbing mojo on another of what Amelinda assumed was Roulette's seemingly endless supply of captured costumed heroes.

"Ms. Lopez," Roulette asked, her eyes never leaving the screen (assuming she had eyes beneath the omnipresent sunglasses that were part of her trademark image), "what do you know of Rising Sun?"

Amelinda shrugged, and ran one hand carelessly back through the short-ish, permanently tousled dark hair that always looked like its owner was standing in the middle of a fierce windstorm, even when she wasn't racing about at high speed. "Rising Sun? I don't know...Japan is the Land of the Rising Sun...there's that tune about the House of the Rising Sun...Hemingway wrote a book I never read called 'The Sun Also Rises'...Massive Attack have a song called "Risingson," all one word..."

"All fascinating entries in the discussion, dear, and all about as useful as a Braille stop sign. Rising Sun, the costumed adventurer? The one you see here with Tap, undergoing reconditioning...?"

"Oh, that's who that is? Well, let's see...I know he's considered Japan's greatest hero, but that could just be his own PR guys at work. Um...he works with the Global Guardians whenever they get their act together enough to actually work at all. And if you can believe on-line gossip, he's gotten busy in the past with Dr. Light. Dr. Light the hero-chick who sometimes works with the Justice League, I mean, not the bad guy Dr. Light. Although actually, I could see the bad Light swinging that way if given the chance, you know? Something about him..."

"Excellent analysis, girl. Really, top-notch. At any rate, we also have a line on Olympian now, and will be dispatching several operatives to retrieve him, so that we can have a little bout between Global Guardians. Should be good for business...and I might send you along on the retrieval job, I haven't decided yet."

"Sweet. You know I love a good snatch and grab."

"Yes, you certainly do. And why are you interrupting me here, by the way, even though I've asked you never to do so uninvited?"

"Oh, right!" Amelinda slapped her forehead in self-directed exasperation. "We just got a preliminary contact from one of the guys on your list! You know, the red-letter list?"

"I assumed that was the one you meant." Roulette turned away from the view-screen for the first time, brushing back a lock of her long reddish-brown hair, her sunglasses successfully hiding her interest, but her body language not quite accomplishing the same. "Who is it?"

"That dork that calls himself Mr. Terrible. We been sending him invites for something like six months now, and he might finally be caving! He wants to know about the next big event!"

"Hmm...I wonder why the change of heart."

"You think he's got some kind of ulterior motive all of a sudden?"

"Well, no...he actually seems barely clever enough to have open and unconcealed motives, let alone the ulterior kind, but it never hurts to ask. Anyway...let's make all preparations to get the young gentleman in attendance." She looked back at the view-screen, and at Rising Sun, blank-eyed and trembling as he received Tap's conditioning. "This Global Guardians thing might be even better for business than I would have guessed."

"Gotta admit, I don't get why all those names made your list, Roulette. I mean, Mr. Terrible? Why would you get all worked up over some limp-dick loser like that?"

"I have my reasons. Ms. Lopez...I want you to go round up Ms. Bal, Captain Harel, and Ms. Sharp – hell, bring Raiden, and see if you can find Calhoun, too, and bring his annoyingly cheerful ass along. Might as well pull out all the stops. Olympian is tough, and I want this bout to go off right. Rally the troops, and report back here for briefing, got it?"

"It be gotten, Roulette – back in a flash!"

And with that, Amelinda Lopez was gone, leaving only another disheveling blast of wind in her wake, mussing Roulette's carefully orchestrated hairdo and rustling the folds of one of her characteristic long red evening gowns.

"That girl is a real pain in the posterior," she muttered. "But damn...Mr. Terrible. Looks like it's time to dust off the JSA protocols and do some more procurement. Didn't think we'd be hosting any of the Justice Society gang so soon after that last ass-whooping they handed us, but sometimes the battles pick you." She fingered a button on the console before her. "Tap – keep at it here, but pace yourself. I'm sending the Hybrid off after Olympian, and after that, it looks like we just got word that Mr. Terrible might be paying us a visit for our next competitions. And you know what that means."

The goblin on the screen wiped the back of his hand across his pale brow. "You want to snatch Mr. Terrific from under the Justice Society's noses and have a throw-down between the two Mr. T's."

"Bingo."

"No rest for the wicked, eh, Roulette? Do you think I might break for lunch, then? Or perhaps a Power Bar, at the least?"

"Have at it. I want you tip-top, Tap – we need Rising Sun and Olympian properly scrambled so we can lure in Terrible, and then we need you to ride herd on him and Terrific, so like I said...pace yourself."

"Duly noted. Say, all this work with our Far Eastern guest here has left me with a craving for sushi. Might we have the chef send along some unagi for a hard-working goblin?"

"So let it be written, so let it be done. Keep going until the food arrives, Tap."

"Aye-aye, skipper. Now then, my friend, where were we...?"

Roulette watched on, her gaze never leaving the big screen, but her thoughts had moved on...Mr. Terrible and Mr. Terrific.

Great days might soon be upon her.

A true rarity: alone there in one of her command bunkers, Roulette actually permitted herself a smile...

"Everything I do turns out disastrous."

Not really the greatest effort as far as catch-phrases went, but it was all Mr. Terrible really had. And to be brutally honest, it was the absolute truth. Even when things went right for the man, they ended up going wrong, too. Like the business with Dr. Psycho, the incident that had gotten him through the door with the Key – in the short-term, it looked like a bit of good luck, unheard of for Mr. Terrible. In a bigger picture kind of way, though, he knew that given enough time, the associated disastrousness would make itself apparent. For instance, since the seeming brush with good fortune had led to him being hired by the Key to grab this Prometheus character and snatch away this bizarre dimensional key that he had in his possession, Mr. Terrible was fairly certain that the Prometheus job would turn out to be a nightmare in some fashion, much worse even than what might have happened to him had the Dr. Psycho job gone down more in line with the way he'd actually planned it...

Bodyguard – he had to chuckle at that. The thing was, in all truth, he'd actually shown up in the industrial district that night not to save Psycho from an assailant, as he'd ended up doing by accident, but to rip him off himself! That was just how things went in the messed up world of Mr. Terrible.

He'd actually gotten a tip from one of the lower-level dimwits in the Royal Flush Gang that Psycho was set to receive a shipment of some high-tech weaponry. He hadn't had all that much of a plan, but he'd shown up in that factory neighborhood figuring he'd find some way to pinch a crate or two of the guns or bombs or whatever they were himself, and then fence them through one of his few and rather tenuous super-villain connections. Getting into the decrepit-looking building in question had been surprisingly easy and without incident, but trouble found him once Psycho and his small goon squad showed up.

He'd heard their voices first, and climbed one of the wall ladders up to the catwalks, orbiting high above the warehouse floor. They'd rolled up the big corrugated door on the north wall, and backed in a single truck. Before they'd managed to roll the door back down, an uninvited shadow had slipped inside. Mr. Terrible saw the shadow slip in...Dr. Psycho, his crew, and the two meat-heads making the drop did not.

This proved exceptionally unfortunate for them, as the shadow was some kind of thrown weapons expert and martial artist: first, several throwing stars or similar bladed weapons shot out of the darkness to open up several throats. As their owners were gurgling their last out onto the cold concrete floor, the shadow – its shape and calm voice marking it as a male for the observing Mr. T – did its best impression of a small whirlwind, cutting through the remaining figures like a thresher through sickly wheat, making use of a strange sort of baton that seemed to hum with energy, and seemed to have exceedingly little difficulty in dislodging teeth from jawbones and fracturing clavicles and scapulae aplenty.

Just as the carnage looked complete, and the frighteningly efficient shadow drew itself up to its full height in front of the diminutive Dr. Psycho – who was busy cowering and gibbering and attempting to bribe his way out of the unforeseen jam, as his vaunted mental powers seemed to be having no more effect on the uninvited guest than a cool summer breeze – just as the shadow began what should have been a final, bludgeoning, perhaps almost decapitational series of blows at Dr. Psycho with that crazy electric baton, the catwalk that Mr. Terrible had been standing on came loose from its moorings at both ends with a rusted scream of protest and resentment, and the whole batch of hardware, along with Terrible himself, came tumbling down upon the shadow's head.

As a result of the interruption, the intruder ended up merely knocking Psycho cold instead of crushing his skull like a watermelon, and the attacker and Psycho were both splayed out unconscious when Terrible pulled himself loose from the metal struts and guide-wires, almost belief-defyingly unhurt.

The shadow turned out to be a guy in some kind of bizarre helmet that looked like the love-child of a welder's mask and the head-piece from a medieval suit of armor. Most of the rest of the guy was lost to view beneath roughly a ton of felled erector set-like building materials and the gentleman's own long purple cape, wrapped about himself like a shroud.

Dr. Psycho had been less impacted by all the falling debris, and before Mr. Terrible could even formulate some kind of new plan, the psionic dwarf was rousing himself.

"Who the hell are you?" he asked, still groggy, and then before Terrible could even so much as grunt, he blurted out in wonder, "You saved my ass! I don't know who you are, buddy, but if this was some whacked-out audition for a hired muscle gig, you got it!"

Then he walked over to the fallen man who'd attacked him, drew back one little leg, and began dispensing midget-sized kick after midget-sized kick to the helmeted head left conveniently accessible by the settled wreckage.

In between his small blows, he'd grunted out his admiration and thanks for the way Mr. Terrible had outfought someone who, as Psycho put it, might have been an inarguable scumbag of the lowest order, but did have some inkling of how to handle himself in a fight. Mr. Terrible prudently decided to let Psycho go on thinking it had been himself, and not gravity coupled with massive coincidence and toppling construction materials, that had done in the attacker.

Once winded from all the kicking, Dr. Psycho had had Mr. Terrible hop into the delivery truck full of weaponry (high-tech grenades, as it turned out), and drive the both of them the hell away from there. "I don't want to talk about that particular low-life back there ever again, you got that? But I'm Dr. Psycho," he'd said formally, proffering one tiny little hand, "although you already knew that."

"Mr. Terrible," Mr. Terrible had answered...and then bit his tongue so as not to add the almost automatic "Everything I do turns out disastrous," although that was the plain truth.

And now, three months later, his encounter with Dr. Psycho having evolved into his new employment with the emaciated ghoul known as the Key, Mr. Terrible was somehow certain that the shape of that disaster was now just about to finally make itself known to him...