Thunderbolt went upstairs and began going through Albert's papers. He quickly found that the Frenchman had been working on the Toy Man question ever since the Godzilla incident, when Albert had been mistakenly credited with the creation of the Army units and airplanes.
    According to him, the most likely candidate for being the Toy Man was Peter Paulson of AMC.

• Mr. Paulson had a remarkably nondescript existence until a few months ago, bespeaking perhaps an artificial identity.
• The name Paulson was clearly connected to Paul Page.
• There was the unique nature of Toy Man's powers again, the unlikelihood of another man turning up with the same abilities.
• There was a good deal of psychological analysis of Paul Page, from interviews done during his time in prison. He had been motivated by a need for people to believe him to be an important and influential supervillain, and then no one had taken him very seriously despite his truly dangerous power. This appeared to match the current Toy Man's motivations.

* * *
    Phoenix Talon rounded up the Blood Boards and heard all about what they'd been up to. Rick had kept them in line, and Dawn had inspired them to remember what they were fighting for.
    "Everybody gets the day off, and we're going to have a party to reward you for your excellent service during the recent Revolution-less crisis." Enthusiastic cheering. "Y'all did great, we'll meet back here next week, take the weekend off."
    "Yea, sensei! Party!"
    Afterwards, Talon called up Peter's office to see if there was anyone there.
    "Agglomerated MegaPublishing."
    "This is John Astaverdia...."
    "Oh, hello Mr. Astaverdia! How are you today?"
    "I'm looking for Peter Paulson."
    "Hang on just a moment, sir."
    "Phoenix Talon, how are you?!" Peter crowed.
    "Peter. We need to talk," Talon replied grimly. Okay, so he was in the office, he wasn't the Toy Man after all.
    "Oh, I know! You guys were so all over the media last night, we've got to capitalize on this while we can!"
    "When would you be free today? Now? Good, I'll be right there." He hung up and gunned the hoverbike. When he got there he breezed past the startled secretary saying, "Don't announce me, I'll just go in."
    "Phoenix!" Peter rose to greet him, smiling, but Talon cut him off.
    "Sit," he snapped. "This conversation has been coming for some time now. Now you're still here, so obviously you're not the Toy Man. Nonetheless to be perfectly frank, up to now you were my chief suspect."
    Peter sat down again, looking somewhat stunned. "Me?"
    "Tell me everything you know about the Toy Man."
    "W-we know that he used to be a villain during the 1940s and 50s. Uh, he fought Ground Zero for a little while, he disappeared, he came back, fought you guys briefly a little while ago, and then made a dramatic resurgence, and since then has been going great guns in a wonderfully for our purposes visual and dynamic fashion," he summed up, regaining some of his sangfroid.
    "How did Toy Man end up in the series? I'm really curious. Who brought his name up into the story conversations?"
    "What do you mean? We showed you the storyboards, the story arcs, you said everything was okay?"
    "Right. Yes. I was lying in wait. What's the first thing that happened when I walked in here a couple months ago?"
    Peter winced. "You're going to bring up that whole all of us being shot with stun rays and you being kidnapped thing?"
    "By?" Talon prodded.
    "It was the Toy Man, I admit."
    "You don't think that was relevant?" he barked.
    "Oh, I think it was very relevant, that's what brought him up onto my radar right away. Someone with the courage, the tenacity, the sheer chutzpah...." He trailed off admiringly.
    "How did he end up in control of the Agglomerated MegaCorp recording facility out in Worcester? Without anybody knowing?"
    "He's a supervillain," Peter shrugged.
    "A little more specific. Exactly what did the supervillain do?"
    "I don't know."
    "Why didn't anyone out there call the cops?"
    "We didn't even know he was there!"
    "How?! How could you not know he was there?! Either you're aiding and abetting him, or you're all idiots to a degree which I find difficult to talk about. Now granted, I'm leaning toward the latter at this point."
    Peter sputtered. "Now wait a minute! We rented that facility not more than a month and a half ago, from a perfectly legitimate businessman, we set up the facility there in order to be able to broadcast and record all of those computerized scenes—which we had hired you by the way to help set up as the stunt coordinator, now granted you were kidnapped, so I can't fault you for that—"
    "Okay, I know—"
    "You've been yelling at me, give me my minute here. I don't like to talk back to you, I have immense respect for you, but let me just get this out," he said firmly. "We hired computer technicians to help us set this up, because we wanted to be cutting edge, state of the art on this. They requested certain rooms set aside for the computer stuff, we let them have that."
    "Okay. And one of these guys was the Toy Man and you didn't know?"
    "One would have to assume," he agreed. "We certainly wouldn't have rented the facility from him and given his access to thousands of dollars, millions of dollars of our equipment, based on the fact that we knew he was a wanted criminal! How little sense does that make?"
    "I don't know, that's why we're talking."
    "Do you really think that Wendell would have signed off on stuff had he known that the Toy Man was involved?"
    "I don't know, that's why we're talking," Talon repeated.
    "Well, anything that happened, Wendell would have to sign off on, so if you're going to blame anyone—and he is an impeccable ad man, he has a family—I can't even believe this!" he slapped the table indignantly.
    "So does everybody in the World Crime League."
    "You're blaming us?" He shook his head.
    "I'm not sure if I'm blaming you yet."
    "We've been used in this! He has attacked us as often as he's attacked you. Maybe he has something against us because—"
    "No he hasn't, frankly."
    "He keeps using us, he's diverting money from our facilities, he's stealing from us!" He seemed to calm down a little. "Granted, he may be ingenious, courageous, daring, but that doesn't change the fact that he's still, y'know, at heart a criminal, in a certain way of speaking. And I don't want to think that our positive and outgoing business relationship is going to be hampered by the activities of this one person. Do you have any idea how much the recent activities have boosted your popularity? Have we shown you this? The book?" He rummaged in a box by his desk.
    Pause. "What book?" Talon asked with deadly quiet. Peter handed over a copy of the Little Red Book, chuckling, which Talon thumbed through briefly. "Where did you get this?"
    "We've got the foundation you said you wanted to set up, and the money being given to the kids? The Blood Boards, we've been working with them. They've been doing some publicity spots, helping people out, and one of them had the little book of Phoenix Talon quotes, the tactics and stuff, we thought that would be a good... um, you're not happy with it," he read Talon's expression, "we can get it off the shelves."
    "Are the royalties going to the foundation?"
    "Yes!" Peter yelped.
    "Okay." He could let this go, he decided.
    "These have been flying off the shelves. And in the last week, ever since that announcement, and now that you guys are out—nationwide publicity. We couldn't ask for better."
    "How many times did I say on the air that Toy Man was one of the most canny and dangerous foes I'd ever met?"
    "Hold on a second." He pulled out a copy of TV Guide and opened it to the Cheers & Jeers section. "Thirty-one."
    Talon nodded grimly. "Forgive me if I'm taking this a little personally."
    "But..."
    "It's not just like somebody wrote that, I actually said it. With my own, admittedly plastic at the time, mouth."
    "Yeah, I got a breakdown about what had happened there... I'm dreadfully sorry about that, um...."
    "And if you're wondering why I'm screaming at you, it's because I had to spend three weeks with my consciousness transferred into a toy, being a puppet for this guy, and some amount of increased security on your part might have prevented it."
    "Granted. I acknowledge that perhaps he managed—"
    "And also the thoughts of Phoenix Talon are in every bookstore in America."
    "They're good thoughts! Except they're not all yours," he added. "We took some stuff from the Book of Five Rings."
    "At least you've got good taste." He flipped through it, looking for anything he might have cause to regret saying. "Has my girlfriend seen this?"
    "Um, yeah, actually, there are a couple of quotes about superheroes dating...."
    He checked that section, but there was nothing he was sure to hear about later on from Candi. He did note that they'd changed it to "Weird Stuff."
    Peter seemed to back on his usual enthusiastic stride. "The letters that have been coming in—we got a package from people requesting guest spots on the show, a group of variants who say that they're really big fans of yours out in Texas?"
    "In Houston?"
    "Yeah."
    "Yeah, I know them."
    "Are they trustworthy? Could we use them?" he asked, all his usual perkiness restored now that Talon appeared to have calmed down.
    "Good old alma mater. Sure. Why the hell not." He smiled grimly.
    "Look, I realize you're upset. I empathize, I do. I've never been through anything like that myself, but three weeks is a very long time." He leaned forward, lowering his voice. "We've got an opportunity here to strike. You guys are very, very hot right now. Did you see the news broadcast last night, this morning? Fighting Voltron in downtown Worcester? Saving the town?"
    "Well, we got lucky. Toy Man fell unconscious at just the right moment. Otherwise I don't know what the hell we would have done."
    "See, the people don't see that! They see you and your hangers-on, who we would like to get some action figure clauses on by the way, do you know whether or not Mr. Silver's halfway house, where the proceeds for that go?"
    "The what?"
    "The K. Robeson Foundation?"
    Talon started laughing. "No, no, no. You've got the wrong idea. They're more like a private detective agency, that's closer. Not a halfway house."
    Peter looked puzzled. "Oh. I assumed that he just hired reformed supervillains. Ones who'd given up, quit. Left the Game."
    "Forty years ago." The Game? Peter might not be the Toy Man, but he would bear watching.
    "If you really have a lot of concerns about this, and I understand why you would, you can talk to Mr. Jenkins, have him explain everything. But I'm sure that you're going to find that we were used, that Agglomerated MegaCorporation was used just as badly—well, not just as badly, but you understand—was used by this audacious individual just as much."
    Talon had regained some measure of control. "Okay. We're going to have to have a meeting with everybody soon, about enhanced security procedures, to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. It's still a possibility."
    "Perfectly understandable," Peter agreed.
    "When you deal with costumes, costumes are going to show up, it's like moths to a bug zapper."
    "Not sure I'd really use that phrase, but...."
    "If you'd talk to the theme villains that I'm going to this afternoon, you would."
    "You think there's going to be a lot of theme villain activity, you hunting them?"
    "Yeah, they're all over town," he shrugged.
    "Could we have a film crew following you?" Peter inquired eagerly.
    "No! I'm going to be moving very quickly," he emphasized. "There is no time for cameras to tag along after me."
    "Okay. If you get into a circumstance where you're about—any sort of—" He looked at Talon's expression.
    "No."
    "All right. Understandable," he gave in.
    "Also, Toy Man, once we finish the present story arc—just tone it down a little."
    "Okay. What if there's a lot of fan support for it."
    "Do it anyway."
    Peter was not completely clueless. "Okay. We'll go over this at the meeting."
    "Now that Needle's actually been in the body of Witchfire for a while, she may really want to talk to you guys, and it probably won't be pleasant, either," he warned as an afterthought.
    "Oh, yeah. Um." He glanced around and lowered his voice a bit. "To be perfectly honest, remember the original Shadow Phantom character? We kind of set him up that way, in such a fashion that you would definitely want to replace such a pathetic and failed character with one of your sterling stature. We might have done something similar, unconsciously, with the Witchfire character. She decided not to go along, and we were kind of painted into a corner at that point. Maybe we could do a Very Special Episode with breast reduction surgery...."
    Talon let that go. "And I don't like the idea of Blood Board action figures," he added. No reason for them to get any deeper into this.
    "Okay."
    He left the AMP building and went out on patrol. Somebody, do something stupid, he hoped, glaring down at the infuriatingly quiet streets. Theme villains would pay.

* * *
    Scott went to his office, comfortable in the knowledge that for all Larry's complaining the paychecks would have come out on time because The Muse was entirely capable of copying Scott's signature. As long as the books balanced at the end of the month, the boss didn't see any problem.
    "Oh hi, Mr. Silver, you feeling better?" Stephanie inquired.
    "Much, now that I'm no longer 1/1000 size."
    "Yes, I could see how that would make you feel a little... short. I'm sorry, it's early in the morning and I haven't had much by way of coffee," she apologized. "Is there anything you need?"
    "News clippings for the last three weeks?"
    "They're already on your desk."
    "Thank you. I go out for a few minutes and the city goes straight to the theme villains," he sighed.
    Felix and Larry arrived a few moments later.
    "Fortunately, since our boss never shows up any more we can come in as late as we—hello, sir!"
    "You know, if I wasn't sure you had the place bugged, that might have caught me," Scott replied amiably.
    Larry tilted his head equivocally. "How are you doing this morning, on this fine and lovely day? Have you found one of the greatest minds of our time yet?"
    "No."
    "We'll get to work on that right away." He went to his desk.
    "Although somebody's out pilfering his notes as we speak."
    "Oh. Well, that ought to be helpful."
    "I see they cancelled 'Come as your favorite theme villain day' at Fenway."
    "They'd better after how we threatened them," Felix growled.
    "I don't know if threatened is really the right term...." Larry paused thoughtfully, opening up the paper.
    "Refused to save you from the fruits of your own foolishness?" Scott offered.
    "Speaking of Fenway, is Paul feeling better?" Stephanie wanted to know.
    Scott hesitated. "I'm not certain I understand the segue, but he seemed all right this morning. Kept twitching every time that duck guy was mentioned. Roy McCoy and His Hyperalloy Decoys?"
    His henchpersons burst out laughing.
    "He just, uh—I'm just wondering whether, y'know, he said anything," Stephanie went on.
    "To me? No."
    "Oh. All right," she said in a small voice. "Y'know, 'cause he wasn't—well, he had been kidnapped, you know."
    "Yes."
    "I know, you know. But—"
    "What our darling secretary is trying to say," Larry put in drolly, "is that Paul stood her up by virtue of being kidnapped. She's now wondering whether or not he's acknowledged the fact that he didn't show up for the date and is now willing to grovel." Stephanie turned pink, but didn't contradict him.
    "I'm not entirely positive, I think at the moment mostly he's reading pompous notes in French and dreading today's inevitable run-in," Scott replied honestly.
    "Today's inevitable run-in?" She blinked a few times.
    "And somehow, Larry this is all your fault," the robot added.
    The Muse shook his head, the picture of baffled innocence. "Whatever could he be referring to...."
    "Mr. Silver?" Stephanie called. "I do have to leave work early—"
    "—Early today? I was expecting it." He went into his office and began catching up on the past few weeks, putting incident pins up on the big city map. The only ones without a pattern seemed to be Fox and Hedgehog. Their timing was exquisite, and Fox kept any number of interesting gadgets stashed in his tweed coat. Sounded like they might be trouble, at least compared to the Postman.

* * *
    Thunderbolt called K. Robeson to update them on his findings. Naturally, Stephanie answered the phone.
    "Ah, hi Stephanie, this is Thunderbolt."
    "Oh, hi!"
    "Hi."
    "How are you?"
    "Doing better," he allowed. "Three weeks being somebody's captive is not fun."
    "No, no. I have to admit that I was really, um, angry before, but then I found out you were kidnapped, so...."
    "Ah, the baseball game. Sorry, can't help it."
    "All is forgiven, don't worry about it."
    "We should try again sometime."
    "Baseball season is kind of over, but we can come up with something else...."
    "Sure. Is Scott around?"
    "Yes. Is this business?"
    "Yeah."
    "Hang on just a minute."
    In a moment Scott was on the line.
    "Hey, Scott, I've just been reading through Albert's notes, some interesting stuff." He recapped the highlights. "I'll drop it off."
    "Well, we should hear soon, if there's a giant explosion it's because Phoenix went over to talk to him."
    "Hm. Interesting."
    "Bring a copy of those by, we can add them to the growing pile of Stuff to Catch Up On."
    As he was leaving the island to bring the notes over, a delivery truck pulled up on the dock.
    "Hello! Thunderbolt? Package for you!"
    He banked the hoverbike down and indicated that the man should put the envelope the ground. "Just leave it."
    "We need you to sign for it."
    "Okay." He did so.
    "Thank you. I'll see you later." He got back into the truck and drove off, leaving the square sitting on the dock, staring at him.
    Wary about having the Postman on the loose, he turned on his defense screens, scanned the envelope. No energy signatures. He called Needle.
    "Yeah?" she answered.
    "Hi!" he said with slightly strained brightness.
    "Hi. Cait Sidhe there?"
    Why would she think.... He explained that he had just received a specially delivered envelope, addressed to "Thunderbolt." "So if you don't see me again, that's why."
    "Okay. Well, open it already."
    He opened it. No boom. There was a scent of perfume. He pulled out the paper.
    Darling Thunderbolt, I understand from the news that you have been cooped up in a dreary, small little city for the past few weeks. While your choice in company for the time that you were there might not have been everything I would have hoped for, I am willing to forgive and forget, provided you make our date tonight. See you at the Top of the World, love always, and the kiss mark.
    "Are you dead?" Needle prodded.
    "Not yet. That'll be tonight."
    "Oh, good. Did you find anything out about Albert?"
    "Yeah, a few things. Not, unfortunately, where he is." He filled her in.
    "You think he might have gone to the building? To confront Paulson?"
    "It's hard to tell. He didn't really include that specifically."
    "Well, if he thought Paulson was the guy... Albert's pretty confident."
    "No evidence of anything."
    "Well, we could check and see if anybody saw him there."
    "Sure."
    When he got to the office afterwards, Scott suggested that they could check out Paulson's house. Another good suggestion.

* * *

    
    Scott called the base. He wanted to talk to Dawn.
    "Hello, Revolution?" she answered.
    "Hello, Dawn."
    "Oh, hi Scott, how are you?"
    "Good. I have a question for you. When Albert went off to look for us, what time was it?"
    "Midafternoon."
    "Midafternoon. Hm."
    "He took the hoverbike that I created for him and flew into the city."
    "Do you have a tracer on those hoverbikes?"
    "No."
    "Shoot. Remind me to put one in."
    "If we did have a tracer, we would look for him, but I don't know where he went. He was so confident that he had figured out exactly what was going on... you know how he gets."
    "Hm. All right. Thank you very much."
    "Have you figured out where he's gone? Do you have any ideas?"
    "Not yet. I was hoping that would help, but it didn't. Oh, well."
    "I hope you find him. I've got to go, good-bye."

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