In the meantime, Phoenix Talon battled his inner urges; part of him wanted to leap out into the light and repeat his offer to them all. A slightly larger part wanted to leap out into the light and take 'em all on. He didn't do either.
    "So is he gonna like, give us their advanced tech and stuff?"
    "Well, he said he'd work things out with our parole officers, get the cops off our back...."
    "What, so, like, we'd be able to do stuff, and—"
    "No, I think he means that if we stop doing crimes, he'll get the cops off our backs," a slightly quicker member explained to his newly excited comrade.
    "Oh." He sounded disappointed. "I kinda like havin' everyone be afraid of us."
    "Yeah, but I don't wanna keep goin' back to jail," was the thoughtful reply.
    "We're not gonna keep goin' back to jail," the leader piped up again, trying to recapture his momentum. "We just have to work around them. We have an opportunity here!"
    "With who?"
    "All right, I don't know the guy's name," he admitted. "I just met with his lieutenant, but he seemed reputable. He had a business card."
    "He had a business card?"
    "Let's see the card."
    "Here y'go."
    "1-800-HENCHMEN?" the Blood Board read in an incredulous tone.
    That's a one-way ticket to pain. C'mon kid, you're smarter than this, Phoenix Talon thought.
    "All right, so what'd this 1-800-HEMCHMEN guy want?" he asked, handing the card back.
    "Well, he's like an intermediary, a lieutenant for this actual, real-name criminal, and they got a plan coming down and they got tech to give us stuff, and all we have to do is sign on. He's lookin' for people to help him with some scores, and instant cash, good pay, tech upgrade, everyone's afraid of us, and he keeps the Revolution out of our hair so we don't go back to jail."
    "Can he do all that?"
    "He's a supervillain," the guy shrugged.
    "Remember what happened last time we worked for a supervillain?"
    "That was working for the evil scientist," he leader corrected, "and evil scientists are different. Evil scientists, like, sacrifice you at a moment's notice. We weren't like a real part of his force, we were like the guys in a James Bond movie who are trapped in the base when Bond makes it blow up, and the bad guy always gets away?"
    "The bad guy doesn't always get away," someone objected.
    "What movies does the bad guy get away?"
    "Y'know, the guy with the cat, where he keeps comin' back?"
    "Oh yeah, the guy with the cat."
    "Can we get back on topic, here?"
    "I don't know, man. There's a lot to be said for not havin' Phoenix Talon perpetually kick the shit out of us," one mused.
    "There is that."
    Conversation see-sawed back and forth. They were split, one segment cautiously interested in Phoenix Talon's deal, one for the supervillain, and a third part undecided. A big chunk of the group seemed to be in the whole thing mainly for the skating, and the group as a whole hadn't been much of a threat in the past, being given mainly to relatively minor crimes (that business about trying to kill Needle having been something of an aberration).
    As he listened, Phoenix Talon gathered that the more volatile members of the group, who had been pushing them hardest toward larger crimes, had been the one killed in the course of that months-ago sequence of events and the one TECH had toasted during the Silverblood incident. Eventually the gang tabled the debate; everyone would think about it for a couple of days, and then on Wednesday night they would decide. They'd have the HENCHMEN guy out to give them his pitch, and hey, maybe Phoenix Talon, too.
    "Okay; so that's a plan."
    "Our plan is to not have a plan?
    "Exactly, dude! Let's skate."
    Phoenix Talon watched for a while, getting a feel for their techniques. He'd be pretty good on one of those things. Then he got on his bike and went home to take out his frustrations in practice. Talk trash behind his back, would they? And here he was trying to help the the stupid punks!

June 22, 1987

The Agglomerated MegaCorp people were very accomodating about the meeting time. Phoenix Talon walked warily into their headquarters at 9 a.m., in full costume under a trenchcoat. The place looked like a combination office/photography studio on the fourteenth floor of a nice building downtown. If things went well, they wanted to take some stills to help with designing the action figures.
    The secretary was a pretty young woman with raven hair; there was something very familiar about her. He told her he was supposed to be meeting Mr. Paulson, and she buzzed him through silently.
    "Thank you." He went on in.
    "Oh, Paige must have let you in. Hi, I'm Peter Paulson," a beaming young man introduced himself.
    "Morning." This guy couldn't possibly be any older than Phoenix himself; he didn't even look like he shaved. His hair had apparently been shellacked in place.
    "I have to say, I'm really excited," Peter gushed. "This is like a dream job."
    "Yeah, sure." He still hadn't made up his mind about this whole thing.
    "Why don't you come on in, do you want coffee, tea, something to drink...?"
    "No, I'm good."
    "Mr. Jenkins should be here any minute, I'm a big fan of your work, been looking forward to this for a long time...." He kept it up for a while. Phoenix Talon tried to be polite; the guy was obviously dedicated. "So we're hoping today that we can handle the basic stuff, and then if we have your approval on everything move forward—you were told about the shots, I'm assuming?"
    "Yeah."
    "For the layouts and the action figures, as well as discussing with you what tacks you want to take for your specific character, um, we just...." He looked through some papers
    "I just want to stress from the beginning that if the team doesn't do this, then I'm not doing this," Phoenix told him firmly. "We all gotta do it together."
    "I understand your loyalty," Peter assured him, "that's very positive, we want a very team-oriented thing, that was one of the reasons that we wanted to talk to you. Um, we—" The door opened, and Jenkins appeared. He was an older man in a suit, clearly a businessman but not a corporate drone, more like he wore it because that was what he had to wear.

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