“House Party”

By Steve Seinberg

A House “cleaning crew” took custodianship of Golden Eagle’s remains and began hosing down the smaller arena where the young hero had been run through by Claw’s magic sword. Meanwhile, Tap shut Claw’s functions down to a bare flicker above unconsciousness, and he and Scirocco then escorted the victorious fighter back to the holding cells. They exchanged him for Rising Sun, ushered the fiery Global Guardian to the main arena, and installed him in a small antechamber just off the ring, a bit akin to the way a thoroughbred is led into a starting stall before a big race. Touch ‘N’ Go waited with him in case he somehow managed to shake off Tap’s applied conditioning – not likely after nearly a week of said hospitality, but as Roulette always said, best not to take chances – and Tap and Scirocco, joined by Pteradon, went to fetch Olympian. Once he was set up in his own antechamber across the arena from Rising Sun, Tap and Scirocco went to join Roulette in the main control room, while Touch ‘N’ Go, Pteradon, and Prometheus all made themselves visible in the crowd, discouraging any animosities that weren’t House-sanctioned and being played out by design in the ring.

Calhoun and Captain Harel were essentially all business, but Amelinda Lopez actually enjoyed being out and about among the many villains on hand for the slaughter. She was in her working gear, which consisted of a one-piece “swimsuit” that was a dark bluish-black, and just slightly more modest than Angelika Bal’s garb with its hyper-plunging neckline, and she accessorized this with thigh-high leggings of a matching blue-black topped off with bright yellow cuffs, short matching gloves (also blue-black with bright yellow cuffs), a yellow belt with the Hybrid’s “H” logo at the center of its clasp, and a long yellow scarf that whipped in the wind when she ran. She’d previously also worn a matching yellow head-band as part of her fighting togs, but had given it up when a visitor to the House had commented that it gave the impression that she must sweat a lot (she’d only heard the remark amid a bunch of other chatter and not seen the speaker, so she’d never been sure if it had been Phobia or Lady Vic, two snooty rich bitches who always got together at these things for a few minutes to diss everyone around them before they’d start in on each other, and then part company, all hissing and seething...only to come back together at the next function like nothing had ever happened so they could repeat the cycle all over again). But Amelinda liked these big gatherings not only because she appreciated the heavy, testosterone-laden male attention she always received, but she also enjoyed the chances for brief introductions to the visiting patrons, many of whom were fascinating characters, possessed of bravery, cunning, and extraordinary powers. She was always happy to expand her circles; if there was anything Amelinda Lopez understood better than all the other Hybrid members except for maybe Harel, it was that no gig lasted forever, and it never hurt to keep up a storehouse of options.

This time, while walking the grounds as the crowd warmed up for the Global Guardians bout, she managed to make the acquaintance of the bloodthirsty, turquoise-skinned Killer Frost; an earth-moving member of the Injustice Society called Geomancer, who got all tongue-tied at the sight of Amelinda’s streamlined bod in its blue-black, curve-hugging attire; a tall, sultry, very elegant young woman called Virtuoso who had inherited the special violin once used by the now-deceased career super-villain known as the Fiddler, and who was wearing an absolutely smashing black evening gown that, in Amelinda’s honest opinion, put Roulette’s red dress to shame; and the ultra-notorious Dr. Thaddeus Sivana, who was creepy and stunted and detestable on sight, like a little toadstool wearing coke-bottle glasses, but who was also one of the most brilliant men currently walking the Earth. Always good to cast those nets wide...

And then the klaxons sounded, signaling all on site that the next match was about to begin. Most of the spectators flocked to the walls that encircled the main arena – walls fashioned from a strange, transparent alloy said to have been developed by, and then swiped from (by Roulette, of course), the Batman himself; the rest of them glued themselves to view-screens situated around the House.

And the antechamber gates were flung open, and the Global Guardians descended upon each other.

Both men enjoyed the power of flight, and urged on by the artificial hostilities Tap was pumping into them, rocketed out of their gates to meet at the very center of the large chamber with an audible crash, and a host of fireworks courtesy of Rising Sun’s incendiary gifts.

The crowd roared its approval. The preceding engagement had been tame compared to this, and neither Golden Eagle nor Claw had visually impressive powers, accompanied by such blazing pyrotechnics. Nobody really had any special grudge against any of the Global Guardians, any more than they did against Golden Eagle or Claw, none of whom had had such distinguished careers so as to have put a bunch of the attendees or their cronies behind bars – it wasn’t like Roulette had Superman and Green Lantern killing each other here – but a great fight was a great fight, and this was a crowd that really appreciated quality violence. Early buzz seemed to be leaning in favor of Rising Sun, as he came equipped with those scorching fire-bursts that looked like they could crisp a herd of buffalo from a half a mile away – Olympian, by contrast, had no such distance attack capabilities, and seemed a likely candidate for a cross-arena roasting. Amelinda, of course, had had occasion to test some of Olympian’s defenses up close and personal, and she was pretty certain that the crowds were selling the uber-sturdy Greek hero short. House personnel were no longer permitted to officially wager on events themselves, not after Tap’s professionalism had been called into question by the Scottish hoodlum known as the Mirror Master at their old location, which had led to a growing chorus of voices joining him in his charges (and Roulette had been fortunate that it had happened on one of those occasions when the Justice Society had stormed the place, as the fight in question had been interrupted and never finished, so no one could prove the accusations or reconstruct the events, which was maybe the only good thing to come out of the JSA invasion, as Tap had indeed been doctoring the results, and was keeping one combatant’s power levels suppressed slightly more than the other’s so as to allow himself to clean up at the betting window...Roulette had known, of course, and Tap had been issued threats the likes of which had turned his already white skin almost translucent, and he knew better than to ever attempt such a thing again)...but nothing prohibited the House staff from making private side bets with each other, and Amelinda had a whopper set up with Scirocco, the latter going with Rising Sun, choosing him, as far as Amelinda could tell, simply because the pale wind-witch found the glowering Japanese hero to be “really sexy in this totally dour kind of way!” Amelinda had only a shaky grasp on what “dour” really meant, but regardless, sex appeal wouldn’t win this kind of battle (and p.s. – she herself didn’t find Rising Sun to be all that hot anyway). Helping to clinch her prediction for her was the fact that Angelika Bal, the only Hybrid member who had been on both Global Guardians retrieval missions – having secured Rising Sun alongside Pteradon and Prometheus – agreed that Olympian was probably the more versatile and formidable guy here...

And the Greek champion was also proving himself to be as savvy as he was durable: he was feinting and dodging, waiting for Rising Sun to commit himself, and she understood that as soon as the Japanese flame-thrower did so, Olympian was going to rush him, take the fight right into his perpetually scowling face, and something about the tactics put her in mind of something Captain Harel had once taught the rest of them.

Harel had been a highly-trained Israeli commando in his pre-Hybrid life before being transformed into the high-flying Pteradon, and the career military man had once presented them with a maxim that he’d urged them to learn (“Learn it and live by it,” he’d actually said, “or you might not live for very long in this line of work.”). The saying he had taught them was “Run from a knife; run toward a gun.” Amelinda had never forgotten this.

The logic was of course that someone inexperienced with combat would naturally feel the urge to tackle a knife-wielder, but to flee from an assailant with a gun, both responses, Harel insisted, that would get a person killed. It would never be a simple matter to disarm a knife-wielder, and even one relatively unversed with knife-play could inflict a fairly massive amount of damage if given a target in close quarters...therefore, best to keep some distance and hope the knife-wielder didn’t decide to throw the blade and turn out to have good aim (no tactic was ever without some drawbacks...). On the other hand, with a gun, the urge might indeed be to make swift tracks in the opposite direction, but doing so would enable a gun-holder to take clear, unmolested aim, and squeeze off a good volley of shots, leaving this a bad option even if there should be any cover available to the person fleeing in the first place...which there might not be. True, jumping a gun-slinger did expose the non-armed person to several terrible seconds of up-close, big-as-a-barn-door target-hood, but not every person with a gun would be skilled with them, and if the one turning the tables survived those deadly seconds and could grapple with the shooter, there was then a chance to both remove the gun as a threat, and to do some damage in return, chances that were nonexistent if one instead chose to run.

The way Amelinda was seeing it here, this was a case of Olympian being Harel’s hypothetical unarmed guy, and Rising Sun the party with the gun. True, the “gun” in question was more like a built-in flame-thrower for Rising Sun that shot jets of napalm through special asbestos fire-hoses, if such a thing could be imagined, but it could nevertheless be seen as a metaphorical gun, what with Rising Sun being able to blast stuff fifty yards away and all. If Olympian didn’t rush him, and went looking around the arena for weaponry, of which there was none, or tried to tear up the semi-impregnable landscape to acquire some makeshift thrown missiles of his own, which would be fruitless, he’d be kept dancing all night, and would get worn down as his mind-controlled teammate would sooner or later score some direct hits, and Fleece or no Fleece, Olympian would eventually be barbecued. On the other hand, as Harel had taught them all, if Demetrios was willing to risk a faceful of blaze for a second or two, he could get inside Rising Sun’s guard, and start bringing the pain himself. And Amelinda could tell that something similar was going through Olympian’s artificially hate-shrouded mind.

The crowd was in a frenzy. Rising Sun did manage to catch Olympian with a full-body blast that scorched the man’s tunic nearly completely to ash, and Olympian retaliated by charging him, just missing the nimble Japanese flyer, catching him a glancing blow that seemed to serve only to antagonize the man: the next fire-blast was so intense that many of the observers were forced to look away, or shield their eyes for a moment, so bright was the gout of flame. Olympian, however, wasn’t hard-headed enough to try to simply take such salvos dead on to prove his might, and like his agile opponent, managed to dodge the worst of it. Still, he was beginning to look a bit blackened, and smoke seemed to be rising from the Fleece itself, although it was otherwise unharmed, still as thick and bright and shining as ever. It was when Rising Sun next made a swoop around the perimeter of the arena, nearly touching the clear alloy wall with one outstretched hand as he went, and then paused – as was clearly becoming a bit of a pattern with him, this fly-pause-blast, fly-pause-blast routine – that Olympian caught him.

He timed his teammate’s cessation of forward motion perfectly, and just when Rising Sun was planning to stop and hover to unleash another of those holocaust-level towers of flame – “Should’ve learned to shoot on the run, Sun,” Amelinda silently chided him, knowing it was over – Olympian shot across the arena like a golden rocket, crushing his teammate between himself and the unyielding metal arena wall. The crunching sound of a ribcage being turned to powder was clearly audible to the crowd, which simply exploded with blood-lust, and this seemed only to feed Olympian’s depraved need to kill, already fanned to terminal levels by the watching Tap. Rising Sun was most likely already dead, but his body hadn’t gotten the message yet, and was still floating there, flames leaking from his eyes and his fingers, and Olympian spread his own arms wide, and then brought his thundering fists together, catching Rising Sun’s head dead-center between them, and more unspeakable crunching sounds followed.

The demolished corpse of the once-proud Japanese hero dropped down to the arena floor to the accompaniment of insane encouragement from the crowd. Olympian threw his deadly fists up to the ceiling and roared like an animal, and it took Tap and the Hybrid almost twenty minutes to get him subdued and back into his holding cell, where they again relieved him of the Golden Fleece, and let the spent young Greek fade off to a most troubled sleep as Roulette egged on the crowd with promises of yet more gore to come.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” her voice came over the network of loudspeakers installed virtually everywhere throughout the place, “the House promises the finest in gladiatorial entertainments, and can any among you say that the House does not deliver?” More raging approval. “And we have a special surprise for you all this evening – not only have we just witnessed one of our finest bouts ever, but we have one last battle on this evening’s card, one previously unannounced, but one that you should all be ecstatic to witness. Warming up in our holding cells right now, our next combatants are a fledgling super-villain gone wrong, one of your number who has crossed the House...and his opponent, ladies and gentlemen, will be...a member of...the world-famed and villain-loathed...Justice Society of America!”

The crowd’s approval was mounting, building and building. Amelinda and Prometheus hustled Michael Holt along silent tubeway corridors and put him into his little antechamber, while not far away, Scirocco and the Harpi were doing the same with his opponent.

“Honored guests of the House...I give you...Mr. Terrible...and cornerstone member of the JSA...Mr. Terrific!”

The crowd’s response was like a supernova of blinding, deafening, white-hot noise.

Approximately twenty-four hours earlier...

So not only was the Key’s imbecilic emissary now taken prisoner for use in some sort of antiquated gladiatorial combat, but as it turned out, his presence in the House had never been necessary in the first place – while there was indeed a warrior known as Prometheus working as part of this Roulette strumpet’s security force, it was the wrong Prometheus.

To say that the Key was displeased would have been the grossest of understatements.

He weighed his options. Naturally, he could just scrap all House-related activities and absorb his losses; he could simply begin tracking down the right Prometheus, just refocus on the Ghost Zone key. The downside to this option was that, as his dimwitted contractor had pointed out once taken captive, he would lose all of the stake money Mr. Terrible had entered the House with, not to mention the up-front retainer fee Terrible had already secured. The Key could of course put other operations into effect that would replenish his storehouses of cash, but this would take time. Even a super-genius couldn’t simply snap his fingers and pull a hundred thousand dollars out of a hat.

Another possibility would be to retrieve Mr. Terrible, and shake the money back out of him. This would be difficult, as the Key hadn’t long been free from his coma-state, and was still trying to integrate himself back into the world of super-villainy. That world moved exceptionally quickly, and his footholds were still tenuous at best. His primary new ally, the one who had been set to transport Terrible back out of the House once the Ghost Zone key was in his grasp, would surely refuse to help with this alteration of the plan – as the Key had told Terrible, this person had no wish to have his true allegiances revealed, nor to openly run afoul of Roulette or her admirers and supporters. The Key himself was one of the world’s greatest escape artists, and could perhaps figure ways to break in and back out on his own, but adding passengers to his mission parameters would complicate things exponentially.

The other option was to enlist a full-blown invasion force. Again, the Key had been out of action long enough that he couldn’t simply rely on the good-will of his contemporaries in the super-villain sphere, nor could he entice many of them at all with promises of missions and funding to come, as he still had yet to reestablish himself as a true force to be reckoned with. But then he hit upon another idea...one that did come with a built-in invasion force – an invasion force that ranked as world-class by basically any applicable standards.

For the first time since Mr. Terrible had been locked down, the Key smiled. In fact, he grinned and capered about for a full five minutes before getting back down to business, and had Mr. Terrible been aware of the display, he would have thanked his gods he was imprisoned safely behind bars and firewalls sufficient to protect his tender sensibilities from it all...

The gates opened, and Mr. Terrible and Mr. Terrific both found themselves forced out into the arena as the walls at their backs in the little antechambers began grinding inexorably forward like something out of an old haunted house movie, effectively negating the little rooms as spaces to stand in. The crowd shrieked and screamed in a group rapture of bloodlust, and both men could feel the reaction as well as hear it.

Tap wasn’t exactly taxed in terms of capping any powers – neither man seemed to have what the skinny little goblin recognized as typical super-abilities – but he did keep busy at Roulette’s orders by using his “forcible empathy” to pump hate and rage through their systems. Terrific had been presented with a trio of T-spheres and his T-mask immediately prior to the fight, although these had been gimmicked in such a way that they could only communicate with each other; also, all of their advanced capabilities, such as laser-beam generation and holographic image production, had been stripped away. Basically, Michael Holt now had at his disposal three spherical projectiles that he could send careening through the air with his own thought impulses. Terrible, for his part, had had his knives returned to him before he was put into the antechamber, and now had a full complement of eight: two in “holsters” on his belt, two in a shoulder harness under his jacket, two more up his sleeves, and a final two in sheaths strapped to his ankles. He liked to maintain that eight was the ideal number not only because it straddled that fine line between too few and too many, but also because it gave him one knife for each letter in the word “Terrible.” It was almost impossible to say which prong of that dual reasoning tree was the more important to him.

It also hardly mattered now. The two combatants stepped into the ring, and the crowd noise soared even further, became almost tangible. The onlookers were of course not impressed with any visual spectacle as they had been while watching Olympian murder Rising Sun, but what this fight would lack in fireworks, it would more than make up for in raw, emotional appeal, because of all the heroes and hero groups out there, while the Justice League was perhaps the most feared by super-villains the world round, the Justice Society – oldest, and progenitor of all hero groups – was in all probability the most hated. If not for the blueprint the JSA had laid down all those decades ago, those current practitioners of professional costumed villainy liked to think they’d have much less organized extra-human law enforcement to contend with. And fueling the fires of their homicidal desires at the moment was the knowledge that Michael Holt – Mr. Terrific – was absolutely a critical member of the current incarnation of the JSA, and killing him off would be a monstrous blow to the group, both in terms of tactical impact as well as emotional destructiveness. Terrible was more of an incidental figure in this – nobody really knew enough about him yet to have much of anything against him, but by the same token, nobody also had much in the way of loyalty toward him. There was certainly a nice symmetry in seeing Terrific have to do battle with a dark mirror image of himself, though, most of the watching criminals would have agreed. And most of the group feelings ran in Terrible’s favor, just out of a vague sort of feeling of villain solidarity, such as it was...or perhaps an anti-hero solidarity (meaning most of those gathered found it simply too much against their natures to root for a good guy). Bets ran about fifty-fifty, however, as while it was true enough that most of the congregation would have preferred to see Terrible win the death-match, he was an unknown quantity whose capabilities were met with a lot of practical skepticism, while Michael Holt, on the other hand, had already proven himself to be a genius and warrior on a par even with someone like the legendary Caped Crusader of Gotham, the mighty Batman.

The crowd thundered. Roulette grinned in vicious, predatory fashion. The Hybrid kept an eye on the patrons, and an eye on the proceedings. And Mr. Terrible and Mr. Terrific squared off, danced at first, tentative, taking their opposites’ measures...and at last initiated the hostilities...

Approximately twenty-three hours earlier...

It was Sanderson “Sandy” Hawkins who was on monitor duty when the odd call came in. The firewalls Michael Holt had designed into the JSA’s security systems were far too prodigiously secure to be hacked into by some outside party, but someone did manage to send in a sort of “Hello, please listen to me” overture on what should have otherwise been one of their secure channels.

Sandy was a bit puzzled, but decided to take the call, and was quite surprised to find that it was being transmitted by a Justice League villain called the Key. Why would a career criminal like this be hailing a group of heroes, and even if there was some need for something like that, wouldn’t it make more sense for him to be contacting the League, who he had more history with? Still, investigating such mysteries was part of Sandy’s job at the moment, so he accepted the call, and the Key’s emaciated visage filled the screen – “larger than life” was not a good look for the man, Sandy decided, reminded painfully of how a stadium full of people had all collectively gasped at the sight of a close-up of Keith Richards being beamed up onto a towering, hundred-foot high screen during a Rolling Stones show he’d once attended – you could actually feel the air in the stadium disappear for a moment, so severe was the response, resulting in a sort of momentary partial vacuum...and the Key made the ravaged Richards look like a fresh-faced, smooth-skinned young schoolboy in comparison. Still, Sand Hawkins was a professional, a veteran hero, and he took the call with characteristic cool.

“You’re the Key. Any particular reason you’re cluttering up JSA airwaves uninvited? I can route you through to the Justice League if you misdialed.”

“No need, my good man, no need – it is most definitely your organization with whom I have business.”

“Really. And what kind of business might that be? Let me guess – you’re selling keys. Or cookies shaped like keys. Or some other key-themed merchandise.”

“Nothing of the sort, Mr. Hawkins. Is it Sand now? Or back to Sandman? I heard about the demise of your mentor – most unfortunate, but it does clear the way for you to fully assume his mantle, yes?”

“It’s Sandman now. But how about we stick to the matter at hand.”

“Yes, the fedora and trench-coat should have tipped me off – much better than your short-lived green-spandex-and-shoulder-holsters look. I always admired Wesley Dodds’ fashion sense, even if he was little more than a cut-rate detective with a few fancy gadgets.”

“Get to the point, Key – what do you want?”

“It’s really more a case of what do we want, Mr. Hawkins.”

“‘We’ being...?”

“‘We’ being myself and the Justice Society, of course!”

“Really. We have common interests, huh?”

“In this one particular case, I assure you that we most certainly do. I know that you are personally acquainted with a woman who goes by the colorful appellation Roulette, yes?”

“We’ve met, yeah.”

“Indeed. And you are also aware that after the Justice Society dismantled her last operation, she simply set up shop elsewhere, and has reinstituted her depraved gladiatorial games...yes?”

“We figured. What do you know about all that, Key? Why do you care, and again, why are you calling us?”

“Well, my young friend, her current machinations are about to involve your group directly!”

“I’m technically older than you, Key, you can drop the ‘young friend’ stuff.”

“Ah, yes, I’d forgot – we have both undergone periods of cold sleep, or ‘suspended animation’ as the masses would have it. Does it discomfit you to share such a bond with one such as I, Mr. Hawkins?”

“It ‘discomfits’ me to just have to look at a thirty-foot high image of you, Key. And if you don’t bring it on home right now, I’m hanging up on you.”

“Oh, please, we both know you’ll do no such thing! You’re too busy trying to trace and triangulate my call! Best of luck, by the way, you won’t succeed – but do keep trying, though!”

“Key, so help me...”

“Very well, then. The point is that I recently dispatched an agent to be on-site for Roulette’s latest contests...let us say I did so just for reasons of my own that need not concern the Justice Society at the moment. At any rate, it turns out that Roulette has a grudge against this particular agent, which I had not known of beforehand. You see, Roulette either is – or fancies that she is – the granddaughter of Terry Sloane, the original Mr. Terrific. Either way, the net result is that she harbors murderous intent toward any who might desecrate his good name, including my agent.”

“And your agent is...?”

“My agent, as you should have guessed by now, Mr. Hawkins, is a relative newcomer to the ‘super-villain’ scene known as Mr. Terrible. He presents himself as a sort of twisted parody of Mr. Terrific as you likely know, and this offends Roulette. She has taken him prisoner, and intends to force him into combat as an unwilling participant in her arenas. This obviously frustrates my own purpose in sending him there in the first place, as he cannot advance my own interests if he is first a prisoner, and then a dead man.”

“And so even though you don’t want to let him get killed off there, you also don’t want to risk your own scrawny neck to pull him out of her clutches...so you want us to do it for you?”

“Well, I certainly don’t expect you to extract my agent from the House, per se – but I think it quite reasonable to ask you to invade her stronghold, yes. And then my agent will have a fair shot at escaping the premises during the ensuing confusion and chaos, at which point I can recoup my investment, you see?”

“Swell. And why would we do all this for you?”

“Not for me, Mr. Hawkins! Does not the general dismantling of villainous schemes fall within your purview as self-styled ‘heroes?’ You would do this for the greater good, of course! And to benefit yourselves.”

“Yeah? How do you figure that? I mean, you’re right, in general, sure, we’d want to bust up Roulette’s operations and shut her down for good...but why do you think we’d have reason to specifically care about what she’s doing this time?”

“Because she can’t very well put Mr. Terrible to death by combat in her deadly games unless she has an appropriate combatant lined up to oppose him...correct? And I have it on unassailable authority that she has put into effect plans to apprehend just such an opponent.”

“Just—oh. Mr. Terrific. She wants to snatch Michael and make them kill each other for her fun and profit.”

The Key made a big show of mocking applause. “Very good, Mr. Hawkins! But even armed with such foreknowledge, you have a problem in trying to mount an invasion, whether preemptive or retaliatory.”

“Yeah: no one knows where her new digs are located.”

“Just so! Mr. Dodds would have been so proud! Such a fine young detective you’ve matured into.”

“Thanks. That means a lot to me. And by ‘a lot,’ I mean ‘pretty much nothing at all.’ But you clearly have something else on your mind, or we wouldn’t be having this nice little chat. You have some way to get to her.”

“Indeed I do. Through my own general greatness, I now know where the new House is situated, Mr. Hawkins. I can supply you and your comrades with precise coordinates with which you can then mount a proper and successful invasion. And I would hasten to add that if you proceed under a sort of Trojan Horse protocol, Roulette will never see your strike coming.”

“You mean let her grab Michael, and then hit her once the Friday Night Fights are underway, and she and her goons will all be focused on that.”

“She will actually be conducting the next round of games on Saturday night, but otherwise, yes.”

“You understand that even if we verify everything you’re saying, and let Michael get snatched...even if we invade just as you suggest and tear down the walls...there’s no way we’ll let you or your agent walk free.”

The Key tittered, and while Sandy Hawkins had no way of knowing this, Mr. Terrible would have thoroughly identified with the shudders that this inspired in him. “Oh, I don’t intend to accompany you, Mr. Hawkins! I will simply observe from afar, as I have been doing all along!”

“You expect me to believe that you’ve somehow cracked Roulette’s techno-security when Mr. Terrific himself hasn’t yet been able to pull that off?”

“In a manner of speaking...yes. Yes, I have.”

Sandy rubbed his chin for a few long moments. “I’d have to run this by the others, Key. We’d have to verify that what you’re saying is true, and we’d have to take a look at the location where you’re saying Roulette’s now situated.”

“Oh, I completely understand – you would be fools not to! And as a show of good faith, and reinforcement of the notion that our time is limited – because make no mistake, one way or another, she will be sending her people after Michael Holt – I will send you the coordinates, and some information about her new security force, a group of super-humans collectively known as the Hybrid. Consider well all that I have told you, Mr. Hawkins...but do so quickly, yes?”

“We’ll see what we can do, Key. You take care now, huh?”

He cut off the connection, leaving echoes of the Key’s horrible cackling laughter still ringing throughout the monitor room. Wasting no time, Sandy first checked to see if the trace and locator programs had been successful, but as the Key had boasted, his own counter-measures had prevented any kind of happy results there. He then ran back the recording for replay, and summoned the JSA leaders and big brains to consult. Within minutes, he had either with him in person or hooked in by secure comm.-link, Hawkman, the Black Canary, Dr. Mid-Nite, and Mr. Terrific himself. They took in the entire replayed conversation several times, and then weighed their options. They took a look at the location the Key had supplied them with and cited as Roulette’s new stomping grounds – a vast sweep of territory submerged about two hundred meters beneath the surface of the Mojave desert – and found their instruments greeted by a repeating loop of manufactured seismic readings that would have fooled anyone not specifically looking for anomalies there. This certainly seemed to lend credence to the Key’s claims. They knew that with the Key’s warning, they could almost certainly avoid the eventuality of Mr. Terrific being taken captive against his will...but that wouldn’t get them any closer to shutting down Roulette, which was something that they did indeed want very much to accomplish. They argued back and forth a bit, but ultimately realized that if they really did want to tear down the House, their best bet was to follow the Key’s advice, and employ the Trojan Horse gambit. Mr. Terrific agreed to allow himself to be taken prisoner when Roulette’s agents showed up, and they began hatching plans for an effective invasion.

Thus began the endeavor they started to informally refer to as “Operation: House Arrest...”

Next Issue: Terrible and Terrific stay busy in the arena, while the JSA begin mounting a very special “Home”-invasion...