Project: Magnus

The first thing Cap­tain Remark­able noticed when the world came back into focus was white. The sec­ond thing he noticed was the dis­tinct absence of cold. No bit­ter 'wrap your arms and shiver' kind of cold that one would asso­ciate with so much white­ness, not even a notice­able change from the temp on the Daedalus.

“Where are we?” the cap­tain asked look­ing around.

“North Pole,” replied Faulkner.

“The toy fac­tory. Why isn’t it cold?”

“You’re assum­ing it is in a cold cli­mate area?”

“Well yea, it’s called the North Pole isn’t it?”

“It’s not called that because of it’s loca­tion Cap­tain but merely for his­tor­i­cal purposes”

“Okay, so why come here?”

“Because I don’t know any­thing about the loca­tion they are keep­ing the Prime so I want to be as pre­pared as possible.“

“And by that you mean?”

“I mean that I need to grab some gear and weapons and locate where they are keep­ing him. The plan is that we will tele­port in and extract him with min­i­mal muss and fuss. Now excuse me a moment while I check in and gather some things.”

“Under­stood.”

---

The first thing Cap­tain Remark­able noticed when the world came back into focus was white. The sec­ond thing he noticed was the dis­tinct absence of cold. Again. "And where might we be now?"

"Some­where I cer­tainly didn't expect to be, although when I think about it, it does make per­fect sense."

"What… oh my,” said the Cap­tain as he took in the vista before him. Every­where there were peo­ple. Peo­ple push­ing car­riages filled with chil­dren (scream­ing and oth­er­wise), peo­ple car­ry­ing bags full of shiny pack­ages with col­or­ful bows. Peo­ple going up and down mov­ing stairs and peo­ple going in and out of var­i­ous lit­tle shops. And every­thing was inside. That was the bit that took the Cap­tain most by sur­prise, the fact that all these peo­ple and boxes and bags and shops were all com­pletely enclosed in a build­ing that appeared to be many, many times the size of his ship.

It was, need­less to say, a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ing. Even for the Captain.

"Wel­come Cap­tain, to the Mall,"

"What is this place?"

"Well, it's called a mall. Basi­cally it's exactly what it looks like, a but(but?) of stores and peo­ple under one roof. Think of it as a mar­ket indoors."

"But it's so… big."

"Thank­fully it's the same size on the inside as it is the outside."

"I'm sorry?"

"Noth­ing, inside joke. Okay, expla­na­tion time. Remem­ber how I men­tioned that there were mul­ti­ple ‘San­tas’? Keep that in mind, I’ll come back to it. The first thing you need to know is that we are in a dif­fer­ent dimension.

Any­way, see the crowd gath­er­ing on the far side of the open area? That is where they are keep­ing the Prime."

"What, out in the open like that?"

"It's a per­fect cover really. Here the peo­ple con­sider him the giv­ing of gifts to good lit­tle boys and girls and go on an annual pil­grim­age tak­ing their chil­dren to sit on his lap and relay to him what they want as gifts."

"Seri­ously? Kind of takes the fun and sur­prise out of it a bit doesn't it?"

"The peo­ple here have com­mer­cial­ized the hol­i­day to the point of hi-​​jacking sev­eral of the hol­i­days that typ­i­cally come before Christ­mas. They don’t care about what it means of what kind of psy­cho­log­i­cal dam­age it does to any­one. They just want stuff. It’s got really bad in recent years here so we tend to avoid this dimen­sion if we can.”

“You said to remem­ber about mul­ti­ple Santas.”

“Right. Well, we typ­i­cally have a Santa for each dimen­sion or plane. In some cases mul­ti­ples is there are worlds that require it. How­ever, this is the first time a Santa, Prime or oth­er­wise has been to this dimen­sion in many gen­er­a­tions. The rea­son is because they have co-​​opted the Santa image. Remem­ber I men­tioned that this was the per­fect place to hide and being a per­fect cover ear­lier? That’s because this world is filled with malls like this one. Hun­dreds of thou­sands of them. And every sin­gle one has a Santa. Not an offi­cial Santa, just some­one dressed up as what they have come to believe Santa looks like. You’ll notice that they the Prime has a white beard and a red suit now.”

Cap­tain Remark­able stood star­ing at the gath­er­ing crowd try­ing to get a glimpse of the Prime, “So how do we do that with all these peo­ple around?”

“It cer­tainly makes it more dif­fi­cult, but not impos­si­ble. And I’m sorry, but I need you to serve as a dis­trac­tion while I make a grab for the Prime. It’s risky but we don’t have much time, they will fig­ure out we are here soon but they don’t know about you yet. It might be enough.”

“Okay then,”the Cap­tain said as he took the gun look­ing thing from Faulkner, “let’s go get us a Santa.”

Faulkner smiled, “That is a Gar­land Gun. If they get too close just point and shoot. It will fire sil­very ropes to entan­gle them, but know this; the minute you fire it they will know we are after the Prime. You have to time it prop­erly or they will be able to cir­cle back and stop me.”

“I under­stand,” replied the Captain.

“And par­don me for say­ing so Cap­tain, but a few min­utes ago you looked like you were about to pass out, now you seem like this is a nor­mal every­day thing for you. I know I’m not that good of a sto­ry­teller, so what gives?”

“When I thought this giant Mall thing existed on a planet in which I’ve been just about every­one, it unnerved me. How could this exist and I not know about it?

How­ever, when you explained that it was a dif­fer­ent, what did you call it, dimen­sion? Right, when you explained that it began to sound like some­thing Harley would say, and after hav­ing him as a crew mem­ber and shar­ing in his adven­tures for all these years, I can deal with things I don’t understand.”

Faulkner barked a laugh, “Fair enough. Okay, let’s go.”

This came as a result of one of the Lit­er­ary+ writ­ing assignments

Min­erva Chad­wick nee Hawk leaned against the rail­ing at the stern of the Hawk Fam­ily owned and oper­ated Mer­chant Air­ship, the Valor of the Sky. She stared at the writhing scene below, cap­ti­vated by her imag­i­na­tion of what cre­ated the dis­tur­bances she could see.

“Cap­tain, what kind of crea­tures live in the Rift?”

Cap­tain Nicode­mus Hawk handed off the con­trols of the ship to the nav­i­ga­tor and walked over to join Minerva.

“No one knows”, he said look­ing out over the rail­ing, “none of our devices have ever been able to pen­e­trate the clouds that you see, and no one that has ever ven­tured in has ever returned.“

“A bit melo­dra­matic don’t you think Captain?”

“Not if it’s the truth. Why else do you think we still have these mechan­i­cal air­ships? They are the only thing that can go over the Rift. No other elec­tronic device can even get close before it shorts out. Even the ones car­ried in air­ships go dead when they get close to the border. “

“So the field, or what­ever, that dis­able elec­tron­ics extends upward from the surface?”

“For as high as we have been able to explore yes. Some spec­u­late that it extends out­side the atmos­phere itself and into space.”

“Is that possible?”

“You are the one with the sci­en­tific mind Min­erva, you tell me, “ the Cap­tain smiled, “The only other thing I can tell you is that humans can­not stay too long near the Rift with­out get­ting very sick.”

“Almost like what­ever shuts off the devices is try­ing to shut off the body as well?”

“That is a good way to look at it.”

“How very inter­est­ing. How very inter­est­ing indeed. I would very much like to know what could sur­vive in that environment.”

“If any­one can find out, I believe it is you.”

Mor­ton Pen­win­kle stood watch­ing the skies. He wasn't so much watch­ing them as wait­ing for them to fall and he wanted to be sure he was look­ing when it started.

He shoved his hands deep in his pock­ets, it was after all fairly cold, and stamped his feet to make sure he stayed warm. In all hon­esty he wasn't really expect­ing the skies to fall. That would have meant some­thing went right, and based on the fact this was the fourth time in as many months that the end of the world had been pre­dicted, yet had failed to hap­pen (after all, if it had he wouldn't be here wait­ing). The doom say­ers were start­ing to get as bad as the weather men.

He shook his head remem­ber­ing the global pan­demic that almost was, but wasn't. Sup­pos­edly Mad Cow dis­ease had become so per­va­sive and stub­born this past win­ter that it was going to hit everycow all at once, then mutate into a new strain. Some CDC researchers pre­dicted it would re-​​animate the cows after killing them cre­at­ing what amounted to zom­bie cows. It didn't sound so bad con­sid­er­ing that peo­ple had got­ten really good at killing cows over the last few hun­dred years until he real­ized that it meant no more steaks or ham­burg­ers. He still wasn't sure how that was going to 'end the world' (and yes, he used air quotes every time he men­tioned it) but it def­i­nitely would have meant din­ners would be a tad less inter­est­ing. Although on the whole, it was bet­ter than zom­bie squir­rels. At least reg­u­lar squir­rels stopped chat­ter­ing long enough to sleep.

Then there was the comet that was going to pass extremely close to the moon, shift­ing it out of it's orbit and, at the very least caus­ing all kinds of destruc­tion as the grav­i­ta­tional forces worked to bal­ance them­selves. Worst case sce­nar­ios had it crash­ing into the Earth itself. All the sci­en­tists were in agree­ment that every­thing would work itself out and har­mony would once again reign, but there was a very likely chance human­ity would not survive.

Then of course the comet missed. Later it was dis­cov­ered that there was a round­ing error and that it had missed the moon by sev­eral mil­lion miles instead of the pre­dicted few hun­dred feet. Mor­ton always shook his head at that one. Being an accoun­tant for the Fifth National Bank of Welling­ton he always had a pro­found respect for num­ber and tended to guf­faw at the mis­take when­ever it came up in con­ver­sa­tion. Which it did. A lot.

And who could for­get the alien inva­sion. Mil­lions upon mil­lions of alien ships had sud­denly appeared in orbit just above the planet. It was cer­tain doom or so the pun­dits had pro­claimed on every talk show they could squeeze them­selves onto. No chance of human­ity sur­viv­ing this, it was most cer­tainly an inva­sion, then had pic­tures of the ships and everything.

Until one researcher had dis­cov­ered that the alien ships were in fact noth­ing more than space fleas and that the orig­i­nal dis­cov­erer had sim­ply mis-​​focused his tele­scope. Then every one that went to ver­ify it and dis­cov­ered the mis­take decided that since the gen­tle­man who had made the dis­cov­ery was so well respected and so very pop­u­lar that it must have been they that had made the mis­take and so pro­lif­er­ated the false claims for sev­eral days.

So it was with a shake of the head that Mor­ton turned around and shuf­fled back into his house when the PA sys­tem started to chirp to life and the announcer came on and stated that the launch of the nuclear mis­sile aimed at the enemy had been can­celled due to a mechan­i­cal fail­ure. He had hoped all along there wasn't going to be yet another post­pone­ment but had put a pie in the oven, just in case.

Build­ings all around where I sit have col­lapsed and the streets are lit­tered with aban­doned cars and debris from the bat­tle. From the repots I'm get­ting over my head­set we held the city but at a steep price. Cam­bridge is pretty much lev­eled, and the North End is gone. No one has any idea how. It wasn't lev­eled or destroyed, it just isn't there. Some­one said it just dis­ap­peared in a flash of light.

It's amaz­ing what passes through your mind some­times. As I sit on my knees feel­ing the pain of my dis­lo­cated right shoul­der and bro­ken fore­arm I remem­ber the last time I felt pain like this. The day I went through the trans­for­ma­tion process.

It hurts. They didn't know that at first, though in hind­sight it should have been obvi­ous. The first test sub­ject died from the pain before they fig­ured it out. The sec­ond went mad before they were able to get the pain and anes­the­sia lev­els right. Even then you feel it and it's still the worse pain you've ever felt in your life. The process causes your bones to re-​​knit them­selves so that they become stronger. Your mus­cles are restruc­tured as mil­lions of new fibers are cre­ated and your skin is reworked so that it's denser and vir­tu­ally impen­e­tra­ble. In essence every cell in your body is trans­formed. In minutes.

All this passes through my mind in an instant. Even now the mem­ory is still enough to make me catch my breath. Which the titan of a man in front of me appar­ently took as a sign of pain or weak­ness because he started laugh­ing. Frankly it's rather annoying.

I raise my head and look at titan boy. He's at least 8 feet tall and built like a young Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger. I have no way of know­ing if was like that before or if the process did this to him. Either way, he's big. The process is also what gives us our pow­ers. Every per­son is dif­fer­ent so we never know what we will end up with. Some pow­ers are, for lack of a bet­ter way of say­ing it, use­less. Hav­ing the abil­ity to grow plants well doesn't really help. Pow­ers can range any­where from telekine­sis to super speed, although not on the level of the Flash, to a super genius. And every­thing in between. I was gifted with telekine­sis. A rather strong form of it too. Where as most have trou­ble mov­ing any­thing larger than a mid-​​sized SUV, I can bring down build­ings. I've men­tioned that the process reengi­neers every cell and makes us stronger and our skin denser. Any­thing short of an armor pierc­ing shell will basi­cally bounce off. It hurts like hell, but only for a sec­ond. It's the equiv­a­lent of being smacked with a ruler for normals.

With that said, physics is still physics. If I hit him with some­thing big enough, and with enough momen­tum, it won't stop him, but might put him down long enough to get away. Instinc­tively I reach out and grab whats left of the side of a 7 story build­ing behind me. He sees the wall start to shake, places his hands on his hips and starts laugh­ing even louder. Not exactly the response I expected but he's start­ing to piss me off so I don't bother restrain­ing myself and fling it at him with every­thing I've got.

The impact is tremen­dous, I feel it from where I'm sit­ting sev­eral hun­dred yards away. It's enough that a cou­ple unsta­ble struc­tures near us start to col­lapse and fall into them­selves in response. I head the crack­ling and tin­kling of small stones falling back to earth after the impact sent them sky­ward. I strug­gle to stand, when a tremor shakes the area and knocks me back on my ass. Trou­ble is it doesn't feel like a nor­mal tremor, nor does it come at the right time. There was too much time after the impact for the two to be related.

That's when I real­ize the crack­ing sounds I heard ear­lier weren't stones. Now that the dust has set­tled I see him kneel­ing on the ground with his left fist on the ground. He has caused the tremor by pound­ing the earth. And he has a force­field sur­round­ing him. That's new.

He grins and picks up the burnt out remains of a car next to him and heaves it at me. Can't dodge with my arm and shoul­der so I push myself up and over using my gift, som­er­sault­ing badly over the car. I land wrong caus­ing pain to flair in my shoul­der and wrench my ankle. No dam­age is done but it puts me off bal­ance long enough for him to uproot a light pole and swing at me. I can't recover in time and the impact throws me across the street. When I land the impact shat­ters my head­set, how­ever my only thoughts are that I'm glad he doesn't play for the Yan­kees and that he's left handed.

He launches him­self into the air directly at me. It's one hell of a leap, but based on the dis­play so far noth­ing for some­one with his strength. As he's in the air I real­ize where we are and using my power grab him in mid air and slam him into a con­crete build­ing in the cen­ter of the street. It's the build­ing where the Red Line goes back under­ground so I put every­thing I have into forc­ing him as far down as I can and pil­ing debris on top.

It won't hold him for­ever but should long enough for me to get away.

I go north, plan­ning to cross over the Charles at the museum head­ing for the Gar­den where our HQ is set up. They need to know that the game has changed.

It shouldn't be such a nice day

We buried my father today. A man con­sid­ered by many as the bright­est mind that ever lived. Oth­ers called him the har­bin­ger of doom. Appar­ently that's the way it works with men who are super geniuses. If his death had been nat­ural I might not hate the sun­shine and cool breezes blow­ing around me as I stand here on the bal­cony over­look­ing the grave­yard where his body now lies.

My girl­friend is with me and has been try­ing to con­sole me all after­noon. Unfor­tu­nately this is one of those sit­u­a­tions where unless you've expe­ri­enced it, you can't even begin to under­stand what it's like. She kept remind­ing me that her father was killed when she was 12, and while that is true, her father wasn't killed by a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion that was cre­ated specif­i­cally to destroy his work. She can't under­stand that because of his work in genet­ics and biol­ogy, and because of the pow­ers he gave me and oth­ers like me, he was tar­geted from the beginning.

I don't blame her. I can't. Of the 10 bil­lion peo­ple liv­ing on this planet and the moon only 15, the ones dad chose for the Ich­a­bod project, would even begin to have an idea of what it felt like. Of those, only five had a par­ent in the project. Then of course only I was lucky enough to have the man that started it all, the man that dis­cov­ered how to give ordi­nary peo­ple what amounted to super pow­ers, as a father.

Right now she is in the other room try­ing to absorb every­thing I told her. In this case I can imag­ine what she is going through. I went through some­thing sim­i­lar 5 years ago when dad told me all about the Ich­a­bod idea. He told me about how he had worked out how to alter a per­sons phys­i­ol­ogy and bio­chem­istry to give them super human abilities.

He had got­ten FDA approval to begin test­ing on humans, and wanted to know if I would be will­ing to be part of the trials.

That's when every­thing went to hell. A group call­ing them­selves 'The Asgard' broke into the lab in Boston, stole all the serum and notes and research and blew up the lab. Injur­ing my dad in the process. They began to exper­i­ment on them­selves. No one is sure where their sci­en­tist came from, or if they even had one, but sud­denly they began to acquire abil­i­ties that were unsta­ble and dan­ger­ous. Well, more dan­ger­ous. Espe­cially in their hands.

Dad went into self-​​imposed exile to recover from his injuries. The worst of which was a shat­tered spine which left him unable to walk. 'Very Pro­fes­sor X' I always said, teas­ing him about it. At least it made him smile.

When he recov­ered to the point he could work again he ded­i­cated him­self to devel­op­ing a serum that would counter the orig­i­nal drug, hold­ing him­self respon­si­ble for all the death and dam­aged caused by Asgard.

Then a year ago they changed course. Some said that the lead­er­ship within Asgard changed, that there had been a coup of some kind and that was why the change of phi­los­o­phy. Oth­ers said it was because they had found out about dad's lit­tle fail safe. That those given the treat­ment became ster­ile and could not pro­duce off­spring. He had said it was to pre­vent the pow­ers from get­ting out of con­trol and evolv­ing into god knew what.

Either way they went from com­mit­ting crimes like theft and extor­tion to ter­ror­iz­ing the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion. I'm con­vinced that they did it inten­tion­ally, know­ing dad would do some­thing and it would bring him out of exile.

And they were right. He came out of seclu­sion and, with the help of the gov­ern­ment, formed the super-​​human group he dubbed 'League'. He kind of named it after the 'League of Extra­or­di­nary Gen­tle­men', but also, as a pri­vate joke, because the train­ing part of the pro­gram would be called 'The Minors'. He did love his baseball.

Because I was his son I was recruited to join. Train­ing was bru­tal. Not only did we get train­ing in using our pow­ers but we went through the stan­dard Marine basic train­ing. Only it was accel­er­ated because no one felt we had a lot of time to fig­ure it out.

We held our own the first time we face Asgard. No one died and no one got seri­ously injured. How­ever in retal­i­a­tion they attacked and lev­eled Atlanta. Sher­man would have been proud, and prob­a­bly a lit­tle embar­rassed. That was six months ago. They are still search­ing for miss­ing peo­ple. They announced a cou­ple weeks ago that they were tar­get­ing Boston next since that was where it all began and where League had setup it's headquarters.

When the announce­ment hit the news dad jumped on a plane from LA, where he had been work­ing to setup a west coast divi­sion, and headed back to Boston. They attacked his plane some­where over Kansas and brought it down. They pulled my father from the plane, tor­tured him for fun then fin­ished the job they started back when they first attacked the lab. I'm told he died quickly once they decided to kill him. Small consultation.

Steph came out after a cou­ple hours and is stand­ing next to me. We stay like that, nei­ther of us talk­ing for sev­eral min­utes until the sirens start­ing going off, announc­ing Asgards arrival in Boston, and my sig­nal that it was time to met the rest of the team.

I really wish it wasn't such a nice day.

---


 Gus­tav sat up as the small grey and black dog walked into through the open gate. He looked around at the pack of dogs that flanked him on both sides.


He smiled, which con­sid­er­ing he was a large Golden Retriever made a fairly expres­sive grin.


"Sam. You have some nerve com­ing here. Espe­cially with out your lit­tle white bodyguard."


"I fig­ured she might upset you a lit­tle after the inci­dent last month, and I wanted to talk to you peacefully."


"Talk? Why should I talk to you? You and your lit­tle 'pets' mean noth­ing to me."
Gustav tried to put every ounce of dis­gust he had into pets. It was a lot.


"Maybe, but the sub­ject mat­ter of our con­ver­sa­tion will inter­est you a great deal. "


"Really. And what could you pos­si­bly want to talk about that I would be inter­ested enough in to pre­vent me from sic­c­ing Thun­der after your scrawny butt?"


"I'm help­ing a cat try to find his friend…"


"A cat!", if pos­si­ble Gus­tav man­aged to put even more dis­gust into cat than he had into pets, "Why on earth would I care about help­ing some flea bit­ten lit­tle furball?!"


"Because he might be a vic­tim of a cat­nap­ping and ani­mal traf­fick­ing." 
 Gus­tav froze with his mouth par­tially open. He close his mouth, licked his lips and looked around at the oth­ers sur­round­ing him. They were all look­ing back at him with a mix­ture of anx­i­ety and sadness.


Finally he low­ered his body to the ground, stretched his paws out in front of him and held his head up.


"Let's talk"


**********


Wat­son was on his hind feet with his front paws on the side of the house try­ing to push his nose as close to the open win­dow as possible.


"Inter­est­ing."


"Whats inter­est­ing?" asked Harley, trot­ting over to see what Wat­son had discovered.


"Sniff and tell me what you smell."


Harley put his nose to the ground and sniffed every­thing he could find. He cir­cled under the win­dow sev­eral times, occa­sion­ally look­ing around as if he expected to some­thing to sud­denly appear.
"Fear."


"And why is that odd?"


Harley sniffed.


He con­tin­ued to sniff and began to work his way away from the house towards the yard.


"Oh, because if he was run­ning away he wouldn't give off fear, but would be anx­ious or nervous."


"Right."


"So he was stolen!"


"Slow down, all it tells us is that he didn't runaway.


Harley sniffed again.


"There's else some inter­est­ing here."


He began weav­ing back and forth across the yard, try­ing to pick up the scent again. Occa­sion­ally he would look around as if expect­ing some­thing to sud­denly appear.
 Sud­denly he froze and looked up at Watson.


"Dog!"
 


**********


"So my con­tacts at both the Wilm­ing­ton and Tewks­bury police depart­ments con­firm what Gus­tav said." Zena said as she set­tled down into a lying posi­tion on the blan­ket next to Sebas­t­ian, "There have been 31 thefts in the last 3 months. No one has any idea who is doing."


"Is there any kind of pattern?"


"Not really. They are tak­ing all types of dogs from pure breed to mutt, cats, rab­bits, ham­sters and even a par­rot. The only anom­aly seems to be age. Older ani­mals aren't being taken."
 "So all young animals."


"Yep." replied Zena. She sat on the floor and looked around at every­one. The only miss­ing mem­bers of the group were Tim­o­thy and Mag­gie who were assist­ing Mal­com with the search for Peri.


Every­one had returned home and gath­ered to share what infor­ma­tion they had gath­ered. No one looked par­tic­u­larly happy.


Sam paced around in cir­cles. He went over to the water bowl, got a drink and water, and with his beard still wet sat down and looked at Watson.


"What did you guys learn at Peri and Chester's house?"


"There was a lot of fear scent all over the place under the win­dow and even some up the wall. Almost like he was try­ing to climb back in."


"Fear scent would be expected in a kid­nap­ping" replied Zena, "Even up the wall. He was prob­a­bly try­ing to get away."


"That was my orig­i­nal the­ory, but he wasn't kid­napped. We fol­lowed the fear scent away from the win­dow and across the yard to a tall oak tree. He appar­ently climbed the tree to escape a dog."


"Wait," inter­rupted Sam, "What do you mean escape a dog?"


"There was a dog scent that over­lapped the trail we fol­lowed out to the woods, but it doesn't look like the dog was actu­ally chas­ing him."


"Wouldn't the dog cause the fear even if he ran away?", Sam asked.


"The dog scent seemed to weave back and forth across Peri's. It appears the dog fol­lowed the scent to the tree, cir­cled a few times and finally gave up."


"Did you find any place where Peri came down?" Zena asked.


Wat­son waited and after a few sec­onds nudged Harley gen­tly with his nose.


"Oh right! Yea!" Harley exclaimed real­iz­ing it was his turn to share infor­ma­tion, "This was my idea! The branches in the trees are thick and look fairly sturdy. There are a lot of them close together and I think Peri, real­iz­ing there was a dog below, must have used the branches to travel with­out com­ing out of the tree."


Tim sud­denly appeared in the win­dow out of breath, "Malcom's patrols found Peri!", he shouted, "He's about 2 miles away in a lit­tle cul­vert. They said he looks okay but appears to be scared out of his mind. Not that I blame his with all those birds cir­cling overhead."


"It's far­ther than I thought he would be but if he used the branches like Harley sug­gested it would be pos­si­ble." replied Sam as he stood up and began pac­ing in circles.


"Far­ther than you thought? You know some­thing we don't?" Tim­o­thy asked as he leapt down from the win­dow and sat fac­ing Sam.


"I think have a fairly good idea of what hap­pened, and I believe I know how."
 
 


Spot­ted this Heron on one of our photo adven­tures. I took sev­eral shots of it in flight but I they were too blurry.

Sub­mit­ting this to the #tues­day­se­r­ial to see what hap­pens and in the hope it forces me to fin­ish the story . I'm leav­ing all the com­ments from the orig­i­nal sub­mis­sion waaay back in Octo­ber of last year (god, has it really been that long).

Wife edited and approved. Hope you have as much fun read­ing as I did writ­ing. Com­ments (even crit­i­cal) encouraged!

---

Tim­o­thy lay curled up in the big bay win­dow, his orange and white tail hang­ing casu­ally off the edge, swish­ing lazily back and forth while he ignored the seag­ull cir­cling overhead.

When the gull landed on the rail­ing out­side the win­dow he gave a big sigh but refused to oth­er­wise move.

"Hey youse guys," shouted the gull.

'Seri­ously? A Boston accent?" replied Tim lift­ing his head.

"Hey, I'm a gull from Baw­ston, whadda want?"

"Char­lie, you live down the street, eat out of our trash and have vis­ited Boston once."

Tim put his head back down, hop­ing the gull would take the hint.

He didn't.

"Believes what youse want cat. Any­ways, I gotta case for youse guys."

Tim heaved another sigh, gave up on nap­ping, stood up and stretched.

"Okay fine. Whats the case?"

"This mook down the street was telling me his room­mate got cat snatched yes­ter­day. He's afraid it might be part of that there theft ring that's going around. He asked me for help and of course I sug­gest he hire the Pack."

Tim sat and started at the gull. He squinted his eyes. He swished his tail.

"Theft ring?"

"Yea, there's been a bunch of these ani­mal thefts in da neigh­bor­hood lately. Dogs, cats, even a cou­ple rabbits."

Tim swished his tail some more.

"I assume you men­tioned our rates?"

"For­getaboutit. He can't cover, I will. You know I'm good forit."

"Right, " Tim stared some more, "Bring your mook by this after­noon, I'll let Sam know to expect you."

"Fan­tas­tic."

"And Char­lie? Lose the accent."

**********

Sam sat on the blan­ket on the floor fac­ing the oth­ers with a small grey cat sit­ting ner­vously beside him. In front sat 3 other dogs and 3 cats includ­ing Tim. Sam had his black and grey tail curled up against his back while he waited for the oth­ers to set­tle down.

"Let me intro­duce every­one. The black and white cat is Mag­gie, the two orange tab­bies are Tim­o­thy and Sebas­t­ian, the white Schnoo­dle dog is Zena, the black and tan Ter­rier that can't stay still is Harley, and the black and grey Schnoo­dle is Wat­son. Every­one, this is Chester. He was brought to us by Charlie."

The lit­tle grey cat nod­ded to each ani­mal as they were intro­duce. Each dog bowed their head when their name was called, the cats merely swished their tail.

"Accord­ing to Chester here, there have been sev­eral cats and dogs taken from their homes in the area over the last few days. Yes­ter­day his house­mate Peri, who is a small grey Burmese like him­self dis­ap­peared. Chester is afraid Peri was taken by the thieves. All he knows is that Peri jumped into a win­dow late in the after­noon, a win­dow with a locked screen, and when Chester return from the lit­ter box Peri was gone and the screen was missing."

"Any infor­ma­tion on this sup­posed rash of thefts?" asked Watson.

"It's not 'sup­posed' replied Chester, I heard from Lula next door that the dog across the street was taken!"

"Relax Chester, I'm not doubt­ing you. We take every­thing as con­di­tional until proven. " Wat­son shifted slightly on the floor, "It helps if we don't go into things with our minds already set on cat­nap­ping. Might miss something."

Chester nod­ded. He was still ner­vous being sur­rounded by so many dogs. Char­lie hadn't men­tioned there would be so many. He licked his paw to help calm him­self and tried to relax a bit. It didn't work.

"Bas­tion, can you escort Chester and make sure he gets home safely?"

"Cer­taintly." Sebas­t­ian replied as he stood up and stretched, "Come on kid."

Sam nuz­zled Chester with his nose gen­tly to encour­age him along.

"You'll be safe with Sebas­t­ian, he might not look like much but he can be tough when he needs to."

Sebas­t­ian glanced at Sam, flicked his tail twice and headed out the door, Chester fol­lowed gin­gerly behind. After they had left the room Sam stood up and began to pace.

"Some­thing both­er­ing you?" asked Zena

"Yes. I've heard rumors about the rash of kid­nap­pings recently, but this doesn't feel like one and it's bug­ging me as to why."

Zena stretched out on the floor as Harley twitched around in a circle.

"You think­ing this wasn't a cat­nap­ping but a run away?" asked Harley

"It had occurred to me, but there is still too much we don't know. You and Wat­son inves­ti­gate Chesters house, focus on the out­side for now. See if you can find any evi­dence or clues that will give us a direc­tion. Zena, you can­vas the neigh­bor­hood. Talk to any dogs or cats or any­thing else that will talk to you about the thefts and see what you can find."

"What shall Tim­o­thy and I do?" asked Maggie.

"I need you two to go talk to Mal­com. See if he can arrange some aer­ial sur­veil­lance of the area. Maybe they can spot Peri or some kind of trail"

"And what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to try to talk to Gus­tav. If there is kind of ani­mal traf­fick­ing going on he will at least have heard about it."