"Like what Dawn did with it?"
    "Sure." Much to my bemusement, I felt a small sting of envy, quickly silenced, at these ties to an evident past, odd as they seemed. I particularly noticed one framed picture, black and white; I didn't even recognize Lucky in it at first. She was smiling, standing with her arm around another woman, a petite blonde, in front of Rockefeller Center. Something about it suggested intimacy, either the close way they stood or else merely that Lucky looked relaxed and happy in a way I've never seen her.
    "OK, let's go," she announced, cutting short my startled contemplation of this object. I've showed her how to use the hovercycles—they're almost painfully simple, designed for use under potentially distracting circumstances—but she still preferred to take her bike to the house; maybe she's afraid of heights, without the stick to break her fall if something should go wrong. I shrugged and ghosted her, worried after that conversation with Chandler.
    Mort's place is a big, old house, relatively isolated. After ringing the bell we heard a faint squeaking and the sound of heavy breathing, until at last the door opened to reveal a rather elderly man rolling a breathing apparatus of some sort; he held the mask over his face with each inhalation.
    "Can I help you?"
    "I'm Needle, with the Revolution, and this is Lucky. We're supposed to be meeting the others....?"
    "They are here," he intoned gravely. "I will see if the master is willing to speak with you." After a lengthy wait we were shown in and escorted to the study, where Mr. Mort and the rest of the team were engaged in conversation. Promethean was trying to argue him into allowing the butterflies to be moved to police custody for the duration; Mort was adamant that they would not leave the premises, and assured us that he had engaged extensive security.
    The guy was sort of creepy and weirdly attractive at the same time. Tall and nearly colorless, dressed in flowing black garments, he moved with grace and power which belied his age, and his fingernails, I could not help but note, were quite long. As we walked back down to the foyer—it appeared Lucky and I were not necessary at all—the inexplicable attraction became stronger. Downstairs, he offered with ritualistic grace the hospitality of food and drink. Promethean refused, saying he was on duty, I simply said, "No thank you," and Lucky asked if they had any vodka, at which point Hans and I mentally skewered her from two different directions.
    The vodka was procured by a beautiful, silent young woman in flowing white robes. Hans made a further attempt to convince Mort that he should allow the butterflies to be moved. The general creepiness of the place seemed to move up a few notches as his irritation became more evident.
    To sum, the man was so obviously a vampire that I was certain he wasn't, but just what he was I had no idea. He didn't give off anything like the vibe Yasmina had. In any case, being a vampire is not against the law in itself, and if he didn't want his property protected it was no business of ours. We had delivered the warning and would keep an eye on the place, and we left without much more ado.
    Once outside, a few breaths of the evening air made all the weirdness seem to dissipate, until the house no longer looked nearly as eerie and I was more than half convinced I'd imagined the feel of the interior and its owner. Then again, the last time I was convinced I'd imagined the whole thing it really was a yeti. I try to maintain a level of skepticism about my own brain these days. Anyway, I developed a wicked headache almost instantly, to the extent that I caught a lift back with Scott rather than making the trip under my own power, and didn't devote a whole lot of time to thinking about the peculiar Mr. Mort.
    Like I said: long day.

April 21, 1987

Woke up way too early, thanks to a commotion that seemed to be coming from the kitchen. I hauled myself out of bed and went to see what was going on, passed Promethean as he stormed out while Lucky waved the front page at me. It took a while for it to come into focus, the only word I caught was "robbery." The butterflies had been stolen. I sat down and rubbed my eyes, focused on the article. It had happened around 7 last night, I read, when the two robbers had.... Puzzled, I stopped and read that again, kept going with a sense of dawning comprehension.
    It was them the whole time. They got there ahead of us and impersonated. The real Mort and butler had been stunned with a working version of another Star Wars toy and tied up somewhere else in the house. That had been the Lepidopterist himself, using his power of pheremone control with consummate skill, leading us down a completely incorrect line of thought.

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