"...And We’ll Blow Your House Down"

By Steve Seinberg

The stealth squad still hadn’t regained the teleporting third of itself, as Dr. Fate and the Crimson Avenger were still off doing whatever it was they were doing, so that left only Dr. Mid-Nite, Nemesis, Hourman, and the Phantom Lady to deal with the wave of villains that came tearing down the hallways toward them on foot. The felons all looked spooked to some extent, so it was no huge leap to figure that word of the forceful invasion at the other end of the complex had gotten underway. This unvalorous contingent was most likely looking for the teleport bay, or some alternative means of escape if any such could be found.

Hourman was happy to take point. He pressed the small hourglass icon on the underside of the gauntlet that sheathed his left forearm, and the wonder drug Miraclo flooded his system. His father, the original Hourman, had invented the chemical, which could bestow super-strength and inhuman durability for an hour’s time, and Rick had since refined it even further. The Miraclo went into effect almost instantaneously once Rick pushed the hourglass button, pouring out of the gauntlet’s built-in reservoir of the substance via a sub-dermal delivery system, so that between one of the super-villains’ steps and the next, Rick gained enough raw power that he could have stood alongside the members of the sound and fury squad currently dismantling the far side of Roulette’s facility. If anything, in fact, he felt almost overqualified once he got a better look at which villains were bearing down on them: though he had no real first-hand experience with any of them, he knew from his studies of various data files that a couple were non-powered baseline human, weapons-master types who usually tangled with Justice League members, and the others were what he would have called “low-powered” at best. He recognized the swordsman called the Cavalier, and the archer called Merlyn. The weirdly pliable gent was a contortionist called Ragdoll, and he was being trailed by a middle-aged, accountant-looking type with a sonic blaster-gun who was known as Sonar, and a big, stocky guy huffing and puffing as he tried to lug around an honest-to-god, oversized jackhammer – this had to be the Quakemaster from what Rick had read. Bringing up the rear, but pushing through all of the others as they stopped at the sight of the JSA members, came a man swallowed up head to toe in a black skinsuit that was cut through with glowing green racing stripes. This one was coming on fast, and unlike his pals, he didn’t stop; he leapt at Rick as if trying to knock down a door, and Rick swung at him hard, only realizing who this was upon fist-to-face impact.

This was the villain called Multiplex. The man once known only as Danton Black, generally one to plague the long-time JLA member Firestorm, had an odd ability he referred to as a form of fission: put briefly, Multiplex could split into multiple identical versions of himself, each of which had limited super-strength, although the more duplicates Multiplex created, the smaller they were in size. When Rick Tyler fed him a crunching, Miraclo-boosted Hourman punch to the chops, Multiplex didn’t just get knocked on his super-powered ass – he got knocked on four of them. Four Multiplexes split, and eight of them got to their sixteen feet, cracking about thirty or so knuckles as they snarled at Hourman, who, to his credit, didn’t flinch for even the barest fraction of a second. If anything, Rick Tyler smiled beneath his cowl, and then waded into the crowd of Multiplexes, as his comrades surged forward past him at the other villains.

Even through thickets of dark skinsuited limbs and flashing Multiplex fists, Rick managed to catch a glimpse of Nemesis giving the Cavalier a harsh lesson in swordsmanship...he saw Dr. Mid-Nite hurl two bladed weapons down the corridor past them, two small metal crescent moons, one of which knocked the sonic gun from Sonar’s hand, while the other streaked past and pinned the wormy Ragdoll to the far wall by staking the palm of his hand to the hard surface, something not even the absurdly limber escape artist could wriggle out of....and after Rick reached down and grabbed one of the Multiplex duplicates by its ankles, and then cleared the area of the other duplicates by swinging his captive around like a blunt sickle in a wheat-field, he saw absolutely nothing at all sweep Merlyn’s legs out from under the man and then break the archer’s nose...and he knew that his new love, the Phantom Lady had gone invisible, but was close at hand...

And then Dee Tyler created a growing field of darkness, another of her Phantom Lady abilities, and Dr. Mid-Nite added to it by tossing down several of his special “blackout bombs,” and then Rick and Soseh Mykros had but to hold tight for a few seconds more while their fellow operatives mopped up the pitch-black scene.

The darkness cleared, and the Justice Society pushed on deeper into the House, making their way toward the arena to link up with Mr. Terrific. Now that he’d committed himself to the rush and embrace of Miraclo, Hourman only had his one hour and counting before the drug wore off, and he’d be back to plain old Rick Tyler for another full day before he could dose again...so while he wouldn’t have wanted to admit this to his teammates, he was actually hoping they might run into some more trouble along their path...grinning a crazed combat grin, he set a hard pace, and led the way...

In her roiling mind, Angelika Bal felt both the crashing of the House systems, and then the effects of Tap shuffling off this mortal coil.

Back when Roulette had first managed to take possession of the Hybrid, Tap had of course done the original mind-bending that left them essentially “programmed” to carry out Roulette’s every whim. However, without constant reinforcement of their new thought-patterns, the Hybrid would eventually revert, and Roulette and Tap were both well aware of this. To combat such an eventuality, Roulette had created a special computer kept in the House that was dedicated to storing the brain-wave patterns and engrams that Tap had forced upon them all, and to constantly re-transmitting them outward…then she’d fashioned some compatible small devices that she’d secreted away inside the big “H”-logo’ed clasps of the belts they all wore, which acted to receive the transmissions of those altered patterns from the dedicated machine, and then imposed them upon the wearers of the belts. As long as they kept the belts on, the devices would keep them under control, even if they wandered away from the House and from Tap. Since they generally wore their full combat gear on all missions, including the belts, and remained in the House at all other times, Roulette had never had any difficulties controlling them. She had tried to alter the set-up so that the belt-devices were self-sufficient, and didn’t need to receive broadcasts from House HQ, but she’d never quite figured out how to fit all of the necessary equipment into a device that was portable enough to be feasible for use on combat missions, as it made no sense to load the Hybrid down with giant helmets or cumbersome backpacks full of hardware, and especially not when opponents would likely tee off on such things as tasty-looking targets. Since the situation had never turned problematic, Roulette hadn’t put a huge priority on cracking the transportability dilemma.

However, when the House systems went down after the JSA hit the place, the brain-wave pattern transmitter also failed, and the belt-devices were suddenly left without any new patterns to force upon the Hybrid, and having no recourse, went into sleep-mode. And then with the demise of Tap, even the sort of ambient “obey Roulette” general commands that he sent out on a regular basis disappeared, and the Hybrid could feel their minds open up and expand, and immediately begin to shrug off the thought-control they’d been subjected to for several months running.

At the time these developments went down, Angelika had been escorting Roulette down a secret corridor known only to the proprietress of the House herself, and to Tap and the Hybrid members. This corridor led to a small node off the main body of the House that was designed solely for escape should all other avenues fail, and it not only had its own independent power supply and teleport bay, but it even had a small airship with its own tube to the surface. One way or the other, Roulette had figured that if the worst came to pass, she could either ‘port out, or use the ship. She had no time to wait for Tap or the other Hybrid members, so she meant to save at least herself, and her protocol called for her to blow the emergency escape node after her departure so that no one else could try to follow or find her. A bit cut-throat, perhaps, and harsh toward her faithful employees, but desperate times and all…

Except that Angelika Bal herself was now proving at a very late hour to be an unforeseen factor in things: just as Roulette was reaching for the keypad next to the final door into the node, one of Angelika’s signature wine-colored blasts of force demolished the mechanism in its entirety, leaving nothing but a snarl of melted wiring sticking out of the wall. Roulette whirled on her in a fury, but her words died in her throat upon seeing the face of the woman who still called herself the Horrible Harpi.

“Witch,” Angelika hissed at her. “All these months…you controlled us. The things you made us do in your name, made us live with…you had my husband put to death!”

“Look. Ms. Bal. I understand your reaction here, I do. But listen to me…”

“No. I am done listening to you, Roulette.” She was advancing slowly, and Roulette backed up against the door to the node, a door meant to be blast-proof against anything short of an A-bomb. “We will never be the same after what you have done to us. There are no reparations sufficient…but killing you will be a small start.”

“You can’t – wait! What do you want? Money? Authority? I can give you all that – and don’t feed me any tear-jerky crap about your husband. The thing that I killed wasn’t even close to Andonis Bal anymore – most of you are still in touch with your humanity, but the Gorgon wasn’t, and you know it. You lost him in the Temple of Medusa, long before I found you, and even before Steve Dayton got a hold of you. You can’t blame me for what happened to you – and you don’t want to kill me. I know you, Ms. Bal – Angelika – you cling to that Horrible Harpi name, but you’re still far too human in your heart to want to resort to murder.”

Were her silky words having any effect? Roulette had an almost superhuman ability to read people, to interpret the thousands of non-verbal cues that everyone gives off every moment of their lives, but Angelika Bal had always been infuriatingly impossible to figure. As it turned out, though, reading her wouldn’t matter one way or the other.

“She may not have murder in her heart even now, creature,” said a deep, terrible male voice, emerging from the passageway behind Angelika Bal, “but I do.”

The enormous figure of Olympian stepped into the pale light, and the Harpi braced for battle, seeking to defend herself, if not Roulette.

“No, fair one” the mighty Greek superman assured her, “I heard all that you both have said, and I understand now that you and your fellows were as ensorcelled by this viper as I had been in her arena. I have no quarrel with you. But please step aside – I bear retribution in my arms, and such gifts must never wait.”

“Look, both of you…”

“No, schemer…destroyer…save your honeyed words for the underworld. Your House has fallen…the hour has grown so very late…and it is time for you to bid your evil deeds farewell.”

Olympian stepped past Angelika Bal, his rage almost as thick and vivid as the Golden Fleece that hung from his tree-trunk neck. He took Roulette in his arms…and even Angelika Bal, the Horrible Harpi, had to look away…

On the plus side, Mr. Terrible had managed to get all of his knives back, even the one that had accidentally speared one of Michael Holt’s T-spheres; on the minus side...well, pretty much everything else.

Things were a little hazy until just after that Captain Marvel clown had somehow busted into the arena dribbling a big super-steroidal Nazi around like a basketball. Mr. Terrible had felt things come apart in his head a bit, and then he became vaguely aware that something was happening with the crowd out beyond the bulletproof glass or whatever it was fencing the combatants off from the audience...and then his head had really gotten a good shake, rattle, and roll after Tap appeared in the arena and then got himself turned into a goblin-flavored snow-cone by Killer Frost. It was around that time that Terrible set about gathering up his knives, and had seen Marvel’s JSA buddy Dr. Fate appear in a cloud of pixie-dust or whatever the hell it was – there was this big twinkly effect, and then Fate was sitting there in lotus position in the middle of the air, all blue and gold, kind of bright enough so as to hurt the eyes a little bit, and he’d started working some kind of sleep spell: Killer Frost was immediately crashed out next to the ice floe that had once been Tap, and then that King Shark savage had busted in looking way too carnivorous for comfort – seriously, all that had been missing was a bib with a picture of a human on it – and Fate just wiggled his fingers a little, and the Shark was sawing wood before he even hit the floor. That told Terrible it was time to either hit the bricks that very instant, or put on his “Foul Play” pj’s, ‘cause Fate was gearing up for a much wider-ranging coma-effect, you could just tell.

Casting about for an exit, Terrible spotted the time-guy, Chronos, outside the far wall of the arena shouting something to some guy Terrible didn’t really recognize, and while Terrible would have assumed Chronos was a real loser just based on his get-up – the sheer outlandishness of which made Terrible’s own red and green garb look like a study in James Bond tuxedo elegance – he seemed to know his business, as in who to talk to and what to tell them...because a bare second later, the unidentified guy had turned, gestured at the outer wall behind him, and was answered when the ceiling gave way in a sort of controlled fashion, and lowered a kind of drawbridge of earth down toward him...and suddenly there seemed to be an escape tunnel there, with, like, a makeshift earthen stairway anyone could start climbing up and out of the House, which several enviable bad guys started to do even as Terrible watched.

Terrible headed in that direction, but Captain Marvel’s abrupt entrance had laid down some intervening rubble he had to navigate, and after struggling his way over and around some of the larger chunks that had been deposited on the once spotless arena floor, and then pausing to dodge the now-unconscious Captain Nazi as he came hurtling past, about two feet ahead of some lame-ass schoolyard-sounding taunt from Marvel, he realized that the doorway he’d been making for was now blocked off by more wreckage. He quickly calculated that he’d have to pull back, cut through a hole in the wall, and then swing wide around the bleachers outside the arena if he wanted to get to that super-inviting upward tunnel. He’d just hopped through the gaping breach in the barrier when a chunk of rock whistled off the seating next to him, sending shards bouncing back into his face upon impact. As he was cursing, whoever had thrown the little stone missile called him by name. He turned around to find some mook in bits and pieces of armor who somehow managed to look pissed off even though his face was hidden beneath a metal mask that looked a little like it came off of a suit of medieval chain-mail, and a little like one of those cow-catcher things on the front of a locomotive, and which also had two antenna-like outgrowths on either side where the guy’s ears presumably were, that glowed and sparked. The guy looked a little familiar, but Terrible couldn’t place him.

“Hey. Mr. Terrible. Remember me? We need to have words, you and me.”

“Um, yeah, man, it’s, you know, it’s great to see you. Solid...but we need to, how about if we, uh...you know, this isn’t the best time, we can talk about this topside, huh, ‘cause that dirt-guy over there just opened up a stairway to Zeppelin for us, and, hey, we don’t wanna miss that, right?”

“You don’t have any idea who I am, do you?” The man was wearing a big purple cape, and then he pulled something clear of it that looked like a baseball bat at first, and then more like a nightstick, and then it started to glow and spit out sparks just like the antennae on the sides of his head...and why did that seem even more familiar...?

“Wait!” Mr. Terrible shouted, snapping his fingers. “I know you! You’re the guy that was trying to whack Dr. Psycho that time!”

It was true. Terrible hadn’t gotten a great look at the guy then, and most of what he did get was either from thirty feet straight up while hiding on a catwalk, or next to him when the guy was out cold under a half a ton of debris, so lacking the proper context, he figured he could maybe be forgiven for not making the guy at first sight. He definitely never thought he’d meet that particular party again...and how bizarre was it to run across him now, of all times, when, in a way, that guy was what eventually led Mr. Terrible to be here in the colossal mess he found himself in right now. Unbelievable, but this really was that guy!

“That’s right,” the guy verified. “And if I’d been able to dig myself out just a little bit quicker that night, I’d have had you both – you know I saw you guys driving away? That’s how close it was. I’ve thought about that a lot since then – plenty of opportunity, you know, ‘cause when you blow a job because a never-was like Mr. Terrible takes you out, believe me, boy, you hear about it!”

“Well, to be honest with you, the whole thing was actually kind of – technically-speaking – sort of an accident.”

“If I’d caught you two that night, Terrible? You know what I’d have done to you? I’d have carved that big ‘T’ right off your face, and sewn it into my cape, and I’d be carrying Psycho’s little head around on my key-chain as a good-luck charm. I’m still trying to patch up my rep from that, you know that?”

“You can sew? That’s cool, that’s a good survival skill to have, like cooking. So, yeah...but anyway, uh...what exactly is your rep, ‘cause I never did get your...what’s your name, fella?”

“You moron,” the man said, advancing on Terrible now, his weird baton-thing humming and crackling and making electrical arcs through the air as he slowly twirled it. “The name’s Prometheus.”

Mr. Terrible goggled at him. “Oh. My. God. The right Prometheus! What are the odds?!”

“The right...what? What the hell are you talking about?”

“And I bet if you had gotten Psycho’s little head onto your key-chain, it’d be bangin’ up against a key to a place called the Ghost Zone, am I right?”

Prometheus stopped for a moment. “How do you know that?”

“The right Prometheus. Christ. And I coulda had the key all those months ago if I’d only known. Aw, well.” He looked at the armored mask facing him, and just from the way Prometheus had his head cocked, Mr. Terrible could tell he was flat-out baffled. “Don’t worry about it,” he comforted the confused assassin, “it doesn’t matter anymore. So...would you say this’ll end disastrously for me?”

Prometheus nodded and began advancing again. “Oh, yeah. And then some.”

Mr. Terrible managed to work up a resigned smile, and drew a couple of knives, and prepared to go down fighting, because really, what else could you do? “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds just about exactly right...”

Ray Terrill was not wired well for what was essentially a stake-out. His winged teammates, Hawkman and the Black Condor, both seemed content to describe wide, lazy circles in the upper desert air while the blank sandy face of the Mojave regarded them impassively in the moonlight. Ray, on the other hand, was not at all content. True, he’d be getting a pretty fabulous charge from the toothy desert sun when it rose in a couple of hours if they were still here, but flying around in circles in the meantime wasn’t nearly as gripping for him as his allies seemed to find it – maybe it was a guy-with-wings thing that the wingless Ray would just never understand.

After almost twenty minutes of uneventful atmospheric tourism, he prevailed upon Hawkman to have Dr. Fate transport them all into the House, where he was sure they could do more good – at the very least, they’d have something to keep them more actively engaged. Hawkman sounded like he was getting a bit edgy himself, but said they’d give it a few more minutes…

And that was when weird things started to happen down below.

First, a curvaceous female figure appeared in the air beneath them, and just sort of floated there, taking stock of the situation. The JSA all knew at this point about how Roulette teleported her guests in from different locations in and around the U.S., so it was a fair bet that this woman, whoever she was, was also a teleporter herself, and upon becoming hip to the fact that a bunch of heroes were leveling the place, had zapped herself up and out…but was now trying to figure out just where she actually was.

Ray made a beeline for her, eager to claim some action for himself, and as he’d been closer than his winged compatriots, he did get there first. The woman turned out to be a whole lot larger than he’d first thought from farther away – not larger as in obese, because her proportions were pretty outstanding, but she was at least a full foot taller than Ray himself. She wore a skin-tight bodysuit that was black, but had silvery-white colored sections simulating long gloves and thigh-high boots, and her enormous mane of stark white hair was shot through with several streaks of jet-black. Ray’s first response, even as he was speeding toward her, was that she looked pretty outrageously sexy, and it was a shame he’d have to riddle her with light-blasts, but as he got closer, he realized that her face, while as striking in its way as her body and hair, was more about the grave than the boudoir: her eyes were spilling silver light out into the air, her lips were black, her skin was the color of ash, and her cheekbones were as much cadaver as they were fashion model.

The woman sensed him coming – he was about the brightest thing in the nighttime sky – and she turned toward him, looking rather majestic, and Ray felt an unaccustomed shiver of fear race laps up and down his spine. The woman seemed to look past him (although difficult to tell, what with the lack of pupils and the silver light pouring out of her peepers), and perhaps catching sight of his allies, and doing some math in her head regarding distribution and population density of heroes, and percentage chances of victory vs. likelihood of escape if she left now, she smiled at Ray, blew him a kiss from those black, black lips, and then was gone just as quickly as she’d appeared.

“She’s called the Silver Banshee,” Hawkman told him from nearby. “And if someone as powerful as her has decided it’s best to depart the scene, it must be fairly hectic down there. Keep your—” He’d most likely been about to say “eyes peeled” or something similar, when a few more villains appeared down below on the desert floor. From that distance, it was impossible to tell just who they were, but it seemed that there were three of them, and that a central figure had ushered the other two out of a large hole in space, and then left them there as it stepped back into the hole and pulled it shut behind him or her – possibly off to retrieve more of their cronies.

The heroes sped in that direction, and just as the Ray was identifying the two villains now heading off in almost opposite directions across the sand (he made them as the Flash villain Heatwave, who might or might not have been comfortable out in the Mojave, and the Batman foe called Killer Croc, who most likely wouldn’t be), he saw more teleportational effects pop into view.

One was being conducted by the Frenchman called Warp, who Ray realized had been the one to usher Heatwave and Croc up and out of the House, and who was apparently offering subway service to a whole passel of super-crooks down there, probably for some emergency-scale credit to be traded on at a later date…the other was accompanied by less of a hole in space kind of effect, and more of a crackling electrical field/energy-signature kind of thing. Like the other members of the JSA, Ray spent a lot of time studying up on his super-criminals, and he paid special attention first and foremost to those who had abilities related to his own – he was well up on anyone possessed of light-based or shadow-based powers – and next up was a whole strata of those super-goons who had the most useful and formidable powers in general, among which Ray definitely included teleportation. He knew the lightning-teleport effect belonged to a guy called Bolt, and what was even more interesting was that Bolt seemed to be lugging around an unconscious Slade Wilson, an assassin so feared and accomplished at his trade that he was known to virtually everyone on either side of the super-crime equation, perpetrators and law-enforcers alike. Ray also knew that Bolt’s range was somewhat limited, so he rushed him, hoping to put him down before Bolt could make another jump – bonus points if he could manage to not only shut down one of the villains’ escape routes in the person of Bolt, but to also take Deathstroke down at the same time. That snooty Greek Nemesis broad would definitely be getting an earful about this if he could pull it off…

Unfortunately, Bolt saw him coming, yelped, grabbed the sagging Wilson around the waist again, and disappeared in another flash of lightning. Ray cursed, and looking around, spotted a similar, answering flash off in the distance – he grinned to realize that instead of heading southwest toward Los Angeles or northeast toward Vegas, Bolt must have panicked, and was shooting southeast, into the barren wilds of unsettled Arizona, where, with his short-scale teleports, it would take him the rest of the night and part of the morning to reach civilization. Ray was about to give chase when the Black Condor shouted to him, pointing out something happening down below.

At first Ray saw nothing but Warp reappearing with a couple of low-level wrong-doers in tow (and as fine as those crazy Body Doubles hotties might be, once Warp left them topside and went back for more passengers, they were still just two human chicks stuck out in the middle of the desert at the moment, and could be dealt with at any point over the next half a day), and he was ready to disregard the Condor’s warning and tear off after Bolt and Deathstroke…but then he understood what the Condor had really been pointing out.

That previously smooth and trackless face of the Mojave down below suddenly developed a significant blemish, a large disturbance that had Ray mystified at first – was it a big black spot appearing? A very localized patch of earthquake? Then he realized that a sizeable hole was being opened up from under the ground, like the tunnel their own Sandman had created a mere half hour ago to allow the JSA’s powerhouses access downstairs, but in reverse. Was Sandy boring his way out?

Ray decided that the answer was “probably not,” as it wasn’t JSA members who came boiling up out of the hole a few moments later, but more villains. Did Roulette have an earth-mover of her own numbered among her staff or her guests? Ray couldn’t think of any off-hand, but when he saw the rich fountain of super-crooks starting to gush up and out of the House, he shot right toward their epicenter. He heard Hawkman trying to call him off, telling him to stay and help hold their positions, but Ray was too eager for a bigger contribution. They could mop up the little single-villain and duo-villain efforts that Warp and Bolt were ferrying out, and all without hardly breaking a sweat, but if a big escape tunnel were allowed to remain open, the three sky-bound heroes ran the risk of being overwhelmed by sheer numbers, and seeing a host of the criminals fleeing in all directions across the desert, a good number of them might conceivably manage to escape capture, especially since they’d have several more hours in which to move under cover of darkness.

Ray Terrill was having none of that. He knew there’d be at least some quantity of hell to pay later for blowing off Hawkman, his leader, but he was assuming that the damage he did to the villains’ overall escape plans would more than offset any kind of reprimand or disciplinary actions he might face later on back at the Brownstone. He went streaking down toward the tunnel, blasting as he went, scattering several still at-large members of the Royal Flush Gang, and then continued on past them, down into the tunnel itself, and still farther, flooding it with coherent laser-beam strikes as he flew, not daring to stop, and he cleared the passageway as he fell, driving the would-be escapees back down into the House, gravity aiding his efforts like a co-conspirator.

He drew up short inside the place, getting his first glimpse of the notorious gambling joint, and stopped for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the relative brightness after the mostly black night sky up above…

And then someone hit him, tackling him out of mid-air.

He rolled with the impact, and came up ready to unload a blinding flash of laser-light intense enough to shear off body parts and cauterize the resulting stumps – better some scummy super-crook than him if it had to come to that – when he realized that his “attacker” wasn’t a villain at all, but his scornful teammate Nemesis who seemed to have taken such an instant dislike to him. He was trying to figure out why she would have knocked him down like that, when a contained but still rather potent explosion rocked the premises a few meters off behind them, right about where Ray had been floating after emerging from the makeshift tunnel.

Still lying on top of Ray, Nemesis twisted her upper body and threw one of her long-bladed knives whistling through the air, and Ray saw it lodge in the powered armor of a big, rangy guy who was floating in mid-air courtesy of his suit’s boot-jets, and had clearly just tossed some kind of explosive pod at Ray – had Nemesis not knocked Ray out of harm’s way, he’d now be little more than a wet decorative pattern all over any House walls still standing. The villain who’d tried to kill him was now screaming, as Soseh’s knife had lodged in a power-feed juncture, and electricity was arcing visibly all over his body-armor, probably half-frying the man.

“He is called Fastball,” said Nemesis, disdain clearly written all over her face. “And I probably should have let him ‘bean’ you, as the baseball players say.”

Ray noticed that the explosion had sealed the aperture through which the villains had been escaping. “Hey, at least I did get the tunnel sealed up, even if it wasn’t the way I was aiming for…”

Nemesis looked like she was about to punch him. Then she pointed to a spot about twenty meters away. “Look.” Ray groaned to see a fresh tunnel already gaping wide. “The tunnels are the work of an Injustice Society member called Geomancer. I was about to take him down when I had to stop what I was doing in order to save you. Now he has opened up a replacement, and fled upwards, taking many of his fellows with him.”

Ray tried on a weak smile. “Least he won’t be opening up any more then, right…?”

“Hourman!” she called off to one side, and Ray saw several members of the stealth squad there, lined up around Mr. Terrific to protect him while he gathered his world-class wits, Dr. Fate floating above them and tracing glowing sigils in the air with his fingers. “Keep this one with you! I will deal with the new escape tunnel.”

Rick Tyler appeared in Soseh’s place as she raced across the cracked floor and vanished up into the yawning earthen corridor the Geomancer had created, her sword drawn and gleaming wickedly as she went.

“Rick,” stammered out the Ray.

Hourman put one hand on the back of Ray’s head and gave it a brief shake. “Later, Ray. Okay? Stay with me, and stay focused.”

Biting back on the acrid taste of shame, Ray Terrill linked up with his allies, and tried to be a useful team-player while Dr. Fate methodically put the opposing forces to sleep…

Next Issue: The walls of the House are coming down, but Mr. Terrible experiences a most bizarre “time-out”...