Scott tried to bring us back on track. "Now that we've amused ourselves with poorly constructed robots...." The walls, we found, were indeed stone. Very well-built 1/1000 scale model.
    "I'm going to have to apologize to you for making fun of your obsession with the Toy Man," I told Phoenix Talon, but he was too busy thinking up new and horrible ways for the Toy Man do die to care.

[Aside: Elsewhere]

    We weren't sure where to go next; there didn't seem much point in continuing with the scripted plot. Somewhere without a camera seemed like a good idea.
    "Where he almost certainly doesn't have a camera is at a certain noninhabited island out in the bay," Talon suggested, having calmed down a bit.
    It was a good thought; we left the faux tunnels and I carried the others over the city toward the bay. The city looked normal; people moved on familiar streets and the air had the correct October nip to it, but when I looked up I got a nasty shock: I recognized the cloud pattern.
    In an effort to stave off the Poughkeepsie flashback I sensed waiting in the wings of my subconscious, I concentrated on what I remembered from the Black Whip Mystery House debacle.
    Phoenix Talon told us that he had been infiltrating the building, worked his way through an air duct—without detection, he just knew it—and ended up in a small room, where two people had caught him almost entirely by surprise somehow. There had been a third man, a short gentleman wearing a bowler hat who had stood just outside the room. He had consulted a pocket watch, pronounced, "Right on time," and left. Then the Librarian had caught him with a cloud of choking, sneeze-inducing dust, and the Archivist—who had looked vaguely familiar—had used his stasis ray....
    I had been outside, keeping an eye on our surroundings while the others worked their way in, had been hit by an energy blast and collapsed, barely conscious.
    The Toy Man had holstered his Star Wars pistol, talking with a nondescript sort who must have been with 1-800-HENCHMEN.
    "Thank you for helping out with this," the second man said.
    "No, it was my pleasure, really," the Toy Man insisted. "And thank you for arranging such a wonderful set of circumstances."
    "Well, we felt like we owed you. Anyway, we can declare all debts paid?"
    "Of course. And it's always a joy to help an old friend in these circumstances."
    A third voice spoke up with a distinct British accent. "I dare say boys that it looks like the blast, as I predicted, was not quite enough to render her entirely insensate. If you'll excuse me."
    Then someone had hit me on the head. Perhaps we should bring a nuclear missile next time we go visiting our henchmen friends. We reached the island; no cameras.
    "We have to find out where the edge is," I mused. "I'm assuming that the Toy Man isn't going to be in the city somewhere, right Scott?" Unless he wanted to play, too....
    "I have no reason to think that he would have to be."
    I looked up with a wince. "They're using the same cloud generator the World Crime League had."
    "Really."
    "Yes. I recognized the pattern."
    "I'm not happy about that...."
    "You're not happy about that?!"
    "Well, at least this time I'm not a chair."
    "So, I'm wondering if there's an edge to this place." I wasn't sure if maybe he had somehow gotten enough power to make the model life-sized (in which case, where the heck had he found the space?), or if maybe in spite of everthing this was an elaborately generated hologram, or what.
    "There kind of has to be, somewhere."
    "Shall we find it?"
    "As good a place to start as any I suppose... although there has to be an 'out' someplace. I suppose it could be the edge. It's more likely he's got a big off switch somewheres."
    Watching the planes take off from Logan and fly off into the unreal sky, I headed out over the ocean, moving relatively slowly in case I ran into anything. Once I'd passed the outer islands and was well out over the sea, I hit it. The surface felt like some kind of flexible plastic over dense gel, and it changed color slightly when pressed.
    "How far out is it?" Thunderbolt asked when I got back.
    "Couple miles." To scale, presumeably. "Could always just try to bust through it."
    "Except if we're action figures, what happens to us outside of this world?" Phoenix Talon asked.
    I shrugged. "We'll have to find out eventually." Best not to think too far ahead.
    According to the timetable Scott had taken from Techmaster, by this point the villain had taken control of virtually the entire city. According to the AMP script, we were supposed to be in a deathtrap. Which we kind of were.
    I carried the non-flyers, and the four of us headed up to where the sky stopped. The material, whatever it was, was very strong. Scott did that strange, improbable thing where he sort of seems to condense and coil in on himself in mid-air and then lash out with shocking force. The sky rippled around the impact point, and a small piece broke out. Some sort of automatic sealing procedure went into action on the edges and kept the damage from spreading far, or any of the weird goop from leaking out. He poked a pseudopod through and looked around.
    The dome was transparent from that vantage, and he could see the entire city below. Around it was a huge, vertigo-inducing room. A couple of vast people stood over distant computer banks, their voices a slow, booming wave. The screens looked like Mount Rushmore.
    "Okay?" one was saying.

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