“Ribbon-Cuttings” (or “My Big, Fat, Greek Abduction”)

By Steve Seinberg

“He nearly got us all killed, Michael. I am just a warrior, not a strategist or a genius like you...but even I can see it. Please do not insult my intelligence by saying you fail to grasp this.”

“Look, Soseh...”

“No – I know I am one of the more recent inductees, and perhaps it is not my place to be saying such things...but as I said, I am also a warrior – I know I am right. And I do not see any of you others saying these things, which strikes me as dangerous.”

“You’re only seeing things as they are now, Soseh – you’re not looking at the potential, and seeing what things can be. And if a warrior like Hawkman can see that, then so can you.”

“I will say it once more: it is bad enough that you have brought in and activated someone like Liberty Belle, who is still struggling to learn a new power set...it is even more foolhardy to have brought in an agent like the Crimson Avenger, who requires that you keep not one, but two other operatives dedicated at all times to supervising her...but Ray Terrill is reckless, and happily so. He revels in it, Michael! He wants to be disruptive and uncontrolled. He has this ridiculous, romanticized view of himself as some sort of wild rebel. There can be no place for such a person in this group, and there can especially be no place for him alongside me. If you insist on keeping him, I will begin by officially requesting a transfer to a different squad, and then I will initiate formal proceedings to request his removal from the Society altogether. He is a danger to us all. And if I go unheeded in this, I will only grant you so much time before I simply take my leave. I realize that of all of our many members, very, very few are absolutely indispensable to the continued well-being of the JSA, Michael, and while you are undeniably one of those...I am not. I have no illusions. I am an extraordinary fighter, but I am not irreplaceable, and I know the Society will let me walk if that is the decision of its leaders, rather than permit me to dictate terms. But just so you know, should that time come...make no mistakes about this: I will walk. And I will be right to do so.”

“You’re overstating things, Soseh.”

“Am I?” The tall, red-tressed Greek warrior known as Nemesis gestured at her surroundings: she and Mr. Terrific, the leader of their sub-squadron of four, were standing in a smoldering blast crater in the middle of a large intersection only a few blocks from Times Square. There were at least a dozen vehicles in view that were tumbled about onto their sides or even their roofs, and the integrity of several surrounding buildings was clearly breached. Most of the ambulances were gone now, having ferried their civilian charges off to the nearest emergency room facilities, but police and photographers were still swarming the area like ants at an especially bountiful picnic site.

“Look...yes, Ray could have handled things better...”

“Better! Michael, the boy has the power of flight, and can attack his opponents from a distance, and yet he chose to grapple hand to hand, not only endangering himself, but also interfering with any kind of opportunities for a clear shot at our foes that the rest of us might have had. They took him hostage, used him as a shield, and forced us to take the drastic actions that led to this – look at this destruction! This city is our home base, Michael, we are sworn to protect it! I cannot speak for you, but I do not accept this kind of result as being sufficient!”

“You’re right, Soseh, the Ray needs some serious schooling, I can’t deny that. He is reckless, and moreso than I had thought, I admit that. I’ll be talking to Hawkman and the Canary about a suspension, and the need for some heavy training before he can be put back into the field. But listen to me: there’s a reason we put him alongside you specifically.”

“Oh? I have offended you in some way? This is my punishment?”

“No, Soseh. The point is that with the possible exceptions of Hawkman and the Black Condor, you are the most natural warrior we have in our ranks. You were bred to be a fighter, and you’ve been honing those skills since the cradle. I want the Ray next to you so he can learn from you. It’s not to torture you – it’s so you can be his role-model.”

Soseh Mykros sighed, and finally sheathed the long-sword she’d been brandishing throughout the conversation, despite the fact that their squad’s battle with members of the Royal Flush Gang had ended close to an hour before (climaxing with the highly explosive and highly property-damaging decommissioning of the enormous robotic RFG member called the Ace at the hands of Power Girl – teammate to Soseh and Michael, and one of the strongest beings on Earth).

“You might wish to have your T-spheres record this, Michael, because I say such things almost never...” Soseh offered, gesturing at the several softball-sized metal globes that floated in the air around Mr. Terrific at all times, technological wonders of his own creation that orbited him as planets do their suns, carrying out his mental commands. “But in this case, Michael, I am not certain that I am up to the task you have set for me.”

Nearby, a creaking light pole finally toppled over into their blast crater with a crash.

Mr. Terrific sighed heavily, and even his T-spheres seemed to dip a bit lower in the air...

The island of Evia is second only in size to Crete among the myriad of landmasses that dot the Aegean Sea and help to comprise the modern-day nation of Greece. So close to the mainland that even Greek natives often forget to think of it as an island, Evia is mountainous at its center, and is known for its friendly capitol, Halkida, which is but a stone’s hard throw from Athens, and for its natural springs, said to be blessed with great restorative powers, the most famous of which are located in Evia’s northwestern-most reaches, at Edipsos.

Despite the interest that the island generally held for archaeologists, and further despite its relative proximity to Athens, where she had spent much of her early years up through her time at university, Angelika Bal had never before been to Edipsos. Her late husband, Andonis, had loved the town and its natural hot springs, and had often waxed rhapsodic about the baths. He had on occasion brought up the possibility of taking her there, and even after the then-deranged Steve Dayton had had them transformed via promethium infusion into something other than human, and her own body had not handled the process nearly as well as her teammates’ had, leaving her wracked with constant pain, Andonis had offered, among other possibilities in his increasing desperation to help his beloved wife, a trip to Edipsos. They had never made it then, and now that Angelika was finally in the well-known resort town, she was a bit dismayed to understand that she still would not be afforded the time for a dip in the healing waters. Instead, she and her fellow Hybrid members were here to retrieve the Greek hero Olympian per their boss’ orders, and then return home immediately. Angelika had proven to be far more suited to life as a super-human combat operative than anyone ever would have suspected during her old life, but even so, she couldn’t help but cast one last wistful glance toward the various hot springs and the resort hotels that offered the kind of luxury spa sessions she suddenly craved – it was true that while the empathic girl, Raven, of the Titans, had cleansed her mind and body of the overwhelming percentage of what had once been her constant post-promethium agony, Angelika had told no one that she still did get occasional flashes of her pain, and spells of mental and emotional anguish...and a long plunge into the renowned waters of Edipsos sounded just heavenly to the woman who still referred to herself as the Horrible Harpi. Unfortunately, that would have to wait. For tonight, the Hybrid was on the hunt.

Roulette’s information had been good: shortly after nightfall, the small group of four had seen a lone dark figure fly in under its own power from the mountains and land on the edge of town, all the while bearing some kind of enormous barrel on its broad back. Clouds rushed across the moon, as if scouring it clean, and its silver-white shine revealed flashes to them of a shimmery golden cape of some sort stretched across the wide, roof-beam shoulders of this figure, and they took it to be the Golden Fleece, and confirmation – along with the flight, and the strength evident in the carefree and easy way with which the figure handled the giant barrel – that this had to indeed be Aristides Demetrios...the mighty Olympian.

The small group already had their orders, and with a quick series of hand signals, Angelika set their plan into motion.

Their first order of business was to lure Olympian to them, away from the town, and any possible aid to him (and while Roulette wouldn’t have cared, Angelika was also hesitant to bring defenseless and easily-hurt civilians into the equation). Taro Raiden, the giant Behemoth, standing flush against a monstrous outcropping of rock near the road, hefted the small car that Amelinda Lopez, the lightning-quick Touch ‘N’ Go, had expertly hotwired and boosted from one of the shoddily guarded resort parking fields an hour or so before, and then Raiden tossed it in a high, almost luxurious arc so that it came plummeting down on the roadway with a titanic crash. The car was cooperative enough to oblige with a small explosion and then burst into flames, even going so far as to ignite some of the surrounding underbrush, so that Angelika did not have to use the force-blasts she could unleash from her own hands to encourage it. Amelinda then got down prone on the roadway, and began wailing out distressed “help me!”-type phrases in Greek that Roulette had taught them all before their departure from the House.

They had chosen their spot wisely, because it was not any police or firehouse personnel who responded to the noise and the fiery aftermath of the crashed vehicle, but a lone male figure who came sailing through the air like a low-flying projectile, and then hovered there majestically for a moment, taking in the scene. Amelinda knew her part, and immediately began repeating her beseeching and distressed cries, trying to keep his attentions focused on her: Roulette had compiled a rather thorough dossier on Olympian for them all, and was very emphatic about the dangers posed by his enhanced vision in all of this. If he spotted the set-up as an ambush too soon, he wouldn’t make the approach, and the Hybrid would be forced to follow him into Edipsos, where he would have the “home field advantage,” or he could even go tearing away deeper into Evia or over to the mainland, where he could either get help, lose them, or as a worst-case scenario, arrange an ambush of his own that could result in their incapacitation or capture.

At the moment, both Angelika and Cassandra Sharp, code-named Scirocco (“the Mistress of the Desert Winds,” as she liked to have it), were circling high overhead, and unless Olympian’s vision powers included a 360-degree panoramic view, he wouldn’t notice them while looking downward at Amelinda – in fact, Angelika was fairly convinced that the Greek hero hadn’t spotted them, or he would have given some indication. Rather, the greater danger was Raiden, their towering Behemoth: if Olympian looked toward the big outcropping of rock where Behemoth was attempting to blend in with the shadows, he would likely spot the mammoth figure, and would conclude fairly quickly that the nine-foot tall Japanese lurker in the iron-studded leather straps was neither a local nor the usual variety of tourist, and was quite likely deserving of some special, law enforcement-flavored attentions.

Amelinda Lopez not only knew her role, however, but was also proving that in addition to watching a fair amount of television in her spare time, she might even have had a future in front of the cameras herself had she wanted to go in that direction. Her olive-complected Latina features and thick dark hair could enable her to pass for a Mediterranean native even in daylight, let alone by the light of a cloud-covered moon and some guttering car crash flames, and she was also a very attractive young woman, and she was using her large, liquid eyes for all she was worth. She looked plaintively up at the well-muscled hero, doing this thing with her eyebrows that had him throwing all caution to the wind, swooping down to kneel beside her, and perhaps readying a marriage proposal.

He asked her several questions in rapid Greek that none of them could follow, and she just kept her eyes nice and big, and made weak gestures toward his face with one hand, as if she were dying, and wanted only to touch that mighty and stubbled jaw-line before her passing. Olympian, being a sympathetic man in such situations, and having no idea what Touch ‘N’ Go was capable of, or why she might have adopted that name, took her hand in his own, and said something reassuring that she again had no way to actually translate. Instead, she just nodded dreamily as if in shock, took a firmer grip on his enormous hand, and then with her own other hand, did begin to caress his jaw and his chin, finally placing her entire palm flush on his cheek. Then, even as Angelika gave Raiden an exaggerated arm-signal from above, and even as the gargantuan Behemoth detached himself quietly from the shadows and began to move toward the two figures in the roadway, Amelinda Lopez began to exert her own powers on the unsuspecting Greek champion.

Oddly enough, Steve Dayton’s promethium infusion process had gifted each of the accident victims who had become the Hybrid with a different and distinct set of powers. All were left strengthened at least somewhat beyond regular human levels, and given some added durability, but that wasn’t the extent of the benefits from the process. Angelika and Andonis Bal’s cases had of course been complicated by the fact that after discovering an odd and ancient artifact in the recently unearthed Temple of Medusa on one of their archaeological digs, they had been bathed in some kind of strange ruby-colored light or radiation before receiving Dayton’s treatments, which had undoubtedly added some extra element to their own transformations that would not have informed the changes of the others. Still, even the Bals had evolved with different power-sets from each other: whereas Angelika was left with an incredibly tough, death-dealing set of claws on her otherwise still-lovely hands, could emit blasts of pure concussive force from those same hands, and possessed a sort of telekinetic flight ability, Andonis had mutated into something that looked decidedly other than human. Aptly renamed Gorgon, Bal’s hair had been replaced with a nest of snakes, and while his own original eyes fell blind, he found that he could see through the eyes of each of those snakes, and could furthermore fire bizarre transformative blasts of some unknown energy through his blind “human eyes” that would turn any target stuck by them temporarily to stone. As for the rest of them, Behemoth had his towering size and proportionate strength, Cassandra Sharp could mentally control wind and sand, somehow even managing to call up ferocious sandstorms in areas where there was no sand naturally present...Curt Calhoun had of course been covered in molten promethium in an industrial accident at Kord Industries before Dayton had even gotten to him, and all the increasingly insane “Mento” had done was to stabilize Calhoun’s condition, rendering him permanently encased in a thick sheath of the strange metal, inhumanly strong and invulnerable, looking like a living robot, and able to also increase the surface temperature of his new metallic skin by several hundred degrees centigrade simply by willing it so...Captain Israel Harel had also grown a new skin, a scaly, blue reptilian one, along with sharp fangs, claws on his hands to rival Angelika’s, a three foot-long pointed tail, and great blue saurian wings that could carry him at hypersonic speeds. And then there was Amelinda Lopez...

Not only was the former professional thief and excitement-junkie gifted with some degree of super-human speed and quickness, but she also found that after the infusion process, she possessed another, more subtle ability, one that could be extremely incapacitating to an enemy in battle: upon making physical contact with any other person, she could drain them of some or all of their kinetic energy, thereby sapping them of their own motion and muscle power, while temporarily adding it to her own. Hence her rather ludicrous code-name: she would touch an opponent...and then go...

The hero known as Olympian naturally knew nothing of this, and was all but engaged in foreplay with the deadly Ms. Lopez by the time Taro Raiden loomed over him, carrying the bole of a huge pine tree like a caveman would have carried a club. Demetrios saw the giant’s shadow, and tried to react, only to find his movements sluggish and dream-like.

“You’re one virile-looking stud, I’ll grant you that,” said the woman beneath him, in American-accented English, “but this big ram-horn helmet makes it tough to see if you look like Jason London. Have to check on that later,” she finished, kissed his cheek, and then in a burst of blazing speed that no ordinary young woman should possess, much less one who had just suffered through some kind of debilitating auto collision, she was suddenly just gone...and the giant now standing above him grunted, and was swinging his tree-trunk so hard at Demetrios that it was whistling through the air...

The impact was tremendous. Behemoth had been savvy enough to not simply knock Olympian several kilometers through the air, but had instead angled his blow so that the sometime Global Guardian instead smashed into the very outcropping of rock against which Raiden himself had been crouching only moments before.

Angelika Bal, the Harpi, swooped down out of the sky like a much more beautiful version of her namesake, closely followed by Cassandra Sharp. “Scirocco!” Angelika snapped, “Follow me in, and then disorient him further.” She dove toward Olympian, who was crumpled at the base of the rock formation and was clearly having some difficulty gathering his wits, and she paused in mid-air long enough to generate a blast of force from her hands that hit the twitching Greek hero even harder than Behemoth’s tree-trunk had, and nearly embedded him in the hard stone at his back. Despite the suddenness and brutality of the Hybrid’s opening salvo, however, Olympian gritted his teeth, growled deeply in his chest and throat, and was forcing himself to his feet as Angelika moved on in a wide arc past him, and was replaced by Cassandra Sharp in her tattered brown wrappings and rags, looking like some mad desert urchin wandered over perhaps from Morocco or up from the Arabian sands. She floated silently in the air before the staggering Greek, weaving gestures in the space before her with her deft and delicate-looking hands, and suddenly a violent sandstorm arose out of nowhere. It tore at Olympian’s flesh, a mad abrasion quality to it everywhere, cutting at his tough skin, clogging his ears and mouth and nose, and blinding him with a million stabbing pinpricks to his eyes.

He tried to fly straight up, and away, so he could get his bearings, regroup, and then dismantle his assailants with extreme prejudice, when a hurricane-level gust of wind forced him straight back down, almost planting him into the ground, and this was then followed by another force bolt, presumably from the other woman, the staggeringly beautiful brunette he had glimpsed only momentarily who had sailed out of the air to devastate him with her power-beams. Olympian was possessed of not only flight, but also great foot-speed on land, and realizing that the air was for the moment cut off from him as a means of escape, he shot back to his feet and tried to take off running to his right, toward the town, where he thought he might find a moment to recuperate. Unfortunately, the girl who had originally suckered him in, lying there so bewitchingly in the moonlit road, was easily as fast as him – faster, perhaps, as her touch seemed to have sapped him so, and he was not yet even recovered from that, let along the force-bolts and sandstorm blasts and tree-trunk blows – and she darted in from nowhere, and cut his legs out from under him with her own, tripping him without mercy, so that he fell prone onto the roadway.

The giant then stepped in, punching downward with one boulder-sized fist, as if trying to force Olympian straight down into the ground, into a grave not yet dug...and so far, that was the attacking group’s first mistake.

Demetrios swung himself around after absorbing the monstrous blow, still sluggish, but able at least to match reaction times with the juggernaut, if not the three women he had come with, and grabbed the giant’s fist with both of his own arms. Grunting with effort, he performed a sort of almost-prone pivot, shifting his center of gravity, and taking the giant’s fist with him, causing the titan to flip through the air over him, and then since Olympian still held on to that fist, complete the arc so that this time it was the giant who went face-first into the rocky ground with bone-rattling force. Before the others could react, Olympian twisted the giant’s arm up behind his back, yielding a cry of pain in Japanese, the gist of which was rather gratifying to hear, even if Demetrios couldn’t understand the details, and then dragged the monster along with him as he got his back up against the backdrop of stone once more, this time with his huge attacker serving as a shield. Bracing himself against the wall of rock behind him, he removed one of his hands from Behemoth’s captured fist, now trapped between the two of them by their bodies, and wrapped his arm around Raiden’s throat, his forearm cutting off the giant’s air, and beginning to crush his windpipe.

Raiden gurgled, his free hand fluttering about ineffectually, as his three teammates drew up before them, Angelika Bal and Scirocco hovering in the air, and Amelinda Lopez standing nearby, looking excited, and not overly concerned with her gargantuan teammate’s safety. Olympian’s eyes were watering freely, and he was blinking them fiercely and rubbing them into his own massive shoulder in an effort to clear them of sand – thankfully for him, Cassandra Sharp had momentarily abated her sandstorm attack when Raiden had been taken hostage, thus ruining her line of fire.

“He’s killing Behemoth!” shouted Angelika. She looked over at Scirocco. “We have been attacking the man, but as Roulette said, his powers supposedly come from his garment – attack the Fleece! Attack the clasp, and his tunic!”

Raiden’s thrashings were a bit too frenzied and violent to allow either Angelika or Amelinda to try to dart in and attempt what Angelika was saying by hand, but Cassandra Sharp had a better option at her disposal. She again decorated the air before her with a series of odd hand-gestures, calling up the whirling jets of sand that defined her, and this time she sent them not at the man they were here to retrieve, but at his clothing. More specifically, as her field commander had ordered, she targeted the Golden Fleece.

Even as she began this assault, she saw the wisdom in it. The Fleece itself seemed impervious to damage from any of the impact and abrasions they’d already subjected Demetrios to, but while it might very well have been enchanted, or some high-tech artifact masquerading as a magic item, the rest of Olympian’s garb was not, as several fresh rips to his white tunic attested. The Fleece was large enough to be worn like a heavy, golden cape, and Olympian had it fastened over each shoulder with some kind of large red discs. It seemed likely that the fasteners, and especially the simple cloth tunic they were fastened to, were vulnerable...and Scirocco let loose a raging torrent of sand at the joining points, whipping in sideways, trying to establish a clear course across the front of Olympian’s neck, so as to cut free both mooring points. The hero seemed to know what she was doing, however, and he pulled Behemoth even more tightly in toward himself, and tried to bury his collarbones up into the giant’s own upper back.

Frustrated, Scirocco had to alter the flow of the wind she was creating, and settled for attacking only the near-side joining of Fleece to tunic. Olympian’s garment was sleeveless, and Cassandra sent a relentless jet of sand into the arm-hole and out again through the neck-hole. This adjusted approach bit into Olympian’s exposed shoulder and cheek, and also began to cut into the back of Raiden’s neck, but Cassandra kept up the pressure.

In desperation, Olympian released Behemoth’s captive fist completely, reached up to join his own hands together, and then gave with a massive, wrenching twist. The cracking sound of Raiden’s neck breaking seemed colossal even despite the localized sandstorm in his ears, and then Demetrios pitched the giant’s corpse sideways at the wind-witch.

He was effective on the one hand, in that Scirocco had to break off her assault for the moment so as to dart aside and evade the mass of meat suddenly hurtling at her, but on the other hand, it was only delaying the inevitable, for even as he threw his now-dead assailant at the hovering girl, the upper left side of his tunic that she had been attacking tore free from the arm-hole to the neck-hole, leaving his tunic – and more importantly, the Fleece – only attached to him over his right shoulder.

Complicating things for him exponentially, the energy-siphoning girl who had suckered him into all this in the first place now sped in under the form of her deceased ally before it could come down to earth, so fast his still brimming eyes could barely track her progress, and then she was before him, pressed up against him, laying one hand flat across the now bare left side of his chest, and tearing with the other at the remaining clasp attaching the Fleece to his tunic while she kissed him full on the lips, draining him even further.

He drew back his head, and then tried to butt her right between those gorgeous dark eyes with the ram horns of his helmet, but again she was too quick: she was out and away before he’d even finished pulling his lips from hers, dancing along even faster now that she’d added yet more of his super-speed to her own.

And then Angelika Bal swept down from whatever piece of the night sky she’d been hiding in, first discharging one of those skull-jarring blasts of force with one hand, so as to immobilize him for the final crucial moment, and then with the other, she raked her promethium-spawned talons through the soft cloth of his tunic, rending it completely open, and through the red disc as well, shattering it, dashing it to pieces, and Olympian’s tunic fell open, and she slashed through the back, tearing the Golden Fleece completely from his shoulders, and streaked away into the sky again, settling twenty yards away in the air to watch, cradling her new gold treasure in her arms as she did.

There was a strange bath of light around Olympian, perhaps already more properly called only Demetrios, and the sounds of ghostly voices crying, lamenting, and the man toppled to his knees, and then brought his fists weakly down against the unyielding stone ground. Spasms wracked his body, the light-show culminated in an almost blinding final flash, and then there was simply a very average-looking young Greek man, slightly pot-bellied even, lying prone and smoldering in the roadway in a torn white tunic, the ram-horn helmet sitting upturned a few yards away, staring up at the moon from its unseeing eye-holes. A column of something like a shameful sort of steam was rising up slowly from the youth’s midsection, twisting vaporously in the starlight.

Angelika touched down to earth near her two teammates, watching.

“Damn. I guess the Fleece really did give him his powers.” Amelinda rubbed the back of her head in wonder.

“We can’t stay here,” Angelika said. “We need to move. This place may seem remote, and we have just brought down its most likely protector, but who knows what kind of alerts the locals may have raised...and groups like the Justice League have teleport technology, which they will not hesitate to use if people like us are getting violent near populated areas. We have to get to the rendezvous point, where we can be retrieved with our own teleport technology.”

“Hey,” Amelinda Lopez jerked a thumb at Taro Raiden’s oversized corpse, lying in a huge pile near the same stone outcropping that had served as backdrop for most of the melee. “What do we do with his big carcass? We probably shouldn’t just leave him here.”

“Why, Amelinda...I am surprised you care. That is almost touching.”

“I’m not gettin’ all misty over Behemoth, if that’s what you mean, Angelika; I just think it’s bad form to leave evidence of who was here doing what to who...and plus, Roulette will probably want to harvest all the promethium out of his system, right? I’m sure we’d get treated to a big-time ass-kicking if we just left all that precious metal sitting around out here for a bunch of Greek kids to play with.”

“She has a point, Angelika.” Cassandra Sharp looked torn between her desire to get the hell out of there and her equal desire to avoid the ass-kicking that Amelinda was right about Roulette most likely issuing them if they left Raiden behind.

“Yes, she does, I certainly agree. There is, however, the problem of ferrying all of our new burdens in. We need to carry Demetrios and the Fleece – separately, I hope I do not need to add – and Raiden as well.”

“Well, you’re a lot stronger than I am, so hey, I can take the Fleece, Cassie can carry Demetrios, and you can drag Taro’s big dead ass, how about that?”

“A characteristically fabulous suggestion, Amelinda, but I think we will do it another way...” Angelika Bal began stuffing the Golden Fleece into her own belt until it hung tethered there at her slim waistline, folded over like a strange sort of apron. “Now,” she said, “Cassandra, take one of Taro’s hands, and I will take the other, and we will airlift him to the rendezvous point. Amelinda, you will carry Mr. Demetrios. Let’s move, people....”

And in the morning, when the townspeople found the wreckage of the stolen car, they couldn’t fathom how it had come to be that way, as it hadn’t run into anything, it was just sitting in a clear patch of roadway, and there were clearly no signs of another vehicle having been involved. In fact, if anything, it looked to the locals like the car had simply fallen onto the roadway from out of a clear, unblemished sky. Only a select few had known that the hero Olympian had been spending time in their midst for the past several weeks, and aside from these, who now wrung their hands in private over what might have befallen the great man, the rest of the native population tried not to think about what the mysterious wreckage might have signified...and if they spent just a bit more time meditating in the healing hot spring waters over the following days, who could really blame them...?

Next Issue: More tensions in the JSA Brownstone, Roulette extends her invite directly to Mr. Terrible, and the Hybrid gear up to greet their imminent guest...