"It's not going to work, Gretchen." His hand touched Dawn's. The encasement disappeared, and she sat up. "Hi, hon," he said very softly.
    "Hi, dad." She smiled, but looked troubled. "I have something I have to do."
    "I know."
    She looked at Gretchen. Walked across the room, holding the sorceress' gaze with her own. "I really, really, don't like you. I don't like hating anybody."
    Gretchen was trying to turn and flee. Reality moved around her, left her facing the same direction.
    "I love you dad," Dawn said softly, with a last look over her shoulder.
    "I love you," he echoed, blinking back tears.
    She took Gretchen's hand.
    Reality changed.
    And Phoenix Talon and Scott were standing in the Prudential Center, with a gorilla and a young man wrapped up in the fetal position. The woman in armor was gone. So were Dawn and Gretchen.
    "Oh! Larry!" Scott remembered, going to him.
    "Now he remembers," came the painful reply. "Oh. Larry. I perform the impossible and what do I get? My voice is cracking. Oh my god."
    "Sorry, I was busy with the woman who kept attempting to feed me to daemons." Seeing that Larry was a bit discommoded to find himself a teenager, he added, "Cheer up, think of it this way—now you'll definitely outlive your wife."
    Gleefully, "She'll never be able to prove it's me! She'll think I'm dead!"
    "She can check on your fingerprints."
    "Damn you."
    "But you'll definitely outlive her."
    "One can't get rid of one's curses."
    The view from the window suggested that everything was normal again. People were milling around, pointing upward.
    Uriel was up there, a flaming form twenty feet tall, her triple voice saying, "Not to worry, the situation has been dealt with. You're all safe, the grid has been reclosed, reality has been restored. Thank the Revolution. They've done an admirable job." She flew off.
    
    * * *
    
    At Grover's Mill:
    "Something's definitely happening. There's probably sufficient permeability for us to—"
    The dome was gone.
    
     * * *
    
    Scott recognized Adam Prime. "Hello. Welcome to Boston." He realized that his phone was ringing. "God, I missed that. Hello, Scott Silver?"
    "Hi," said Reilly. "I'm at police headquarters right now, Scott? And I can't help but notice that the clock on my computer says that it's three days later. The last time I looked at the clock it was Tuesday."
    "That's because it's three days later."
    "I...."
    "Would you—"
    "Do you have an explanation?"
    "Oh yes, I do."
    Talon called Rick's house. "Rick?"
    "Yes? Guys look—wait—oh jeez, I'm sorry. She's gone, she's not here!" He sounded panicky.
    "I kind of expected that. Is everyone else there? And whole, and like not dead?"
    "Yeah. Wait a minute.. hang on a second." There was the sound of the phone hitting the floor.
    "Rick?"
    "Hello, John?" Candy picked up the phone. "I think he just... she's gone, isn't she?"
    "I think so, baby, yeah."
    "Rick just looked into the room where she was before... something happened, there's..."
    "We got a lot to talk about. But you guys are okay, right?"
    "Yeah."
    "That's an improvement on the way things were.":
    "I have this weird pain in my chest, but otherwise... I'm okay, Tao's okay, everyone... there's just two dozen roses where she was."
    "Stay there, we'll come over and pick you up soon." He hung up. "Dawn's gone." He looked around the room. "Not that that means anything to you. Phoenix Talon," he introduced himself.
    Adam Prime, agent of the PAA, the gorilla replied silently. What year is this?
    "Weren't those Chinese communists?"
    Adam looked at him quizzically. And heard an old, familiar voice in his mind as Eve said, Adam?! I never thought to have this pleasure again. She had believed him killed holding off a Nazi attack in '44. She was able to fill him in on some of the recent happenings, and her link with him enabled her to inform the MEDUSA forces that things in Boston appeared to be under control. Sort of.
    "Scott!" Talon was struck by a sudden though. "You try to call Thunderbolt, I'll try Needle." Nothing. "Oh, shit."
    "Got nothing," Scott confirmed grimly. "We should probably get out of here." Before they did that, they looked out the window toward the harbor. Where their destroyed base had once stood there appeared to be a castle. "Well that's different." Bostonians were walking around the city in a daze, wondering had happened to the past three days. Scott called Felix.
    "Hello, welcome to the Blobcave."
    "Hello, Felix."
    "Um, Larry just disappeared. Do you know anything about that?"
    "Yeah, he's standing right next to me. ŚCourse he's, oh, sixteen again."
    Pause. Felix started laughing.
    Next up was contacting JT. Ships were steaming into the harbor—New Horizons appeared to have built a half-dozen copies of the Futurian's ship, ensuring the safety of the high seas for the foreseeable future.
    "Yes?"
    "Mr. Mariner?"
    "Yes?"
    "Hi, it's Scott Silver."
    "Yes?"
    "You can avoid invading Boston."
    "I was wondering why we were planning on doing that. We're in contact right now with Privateer and members of the Swordbearers, and we're in our submersible getting ready to back up their assault, and well... it's just an ordinary city."
    "Except for the castle that's currently on our island."
    "Allow me to check that." Pause. "Hm, interesting construction. When did you build a castle?"
    "Well, that's sort of the problem. Let's avoid the castle at the moment, I'm not entirely sure what's in it." Scott gave him the K. Robeson address. "We're gonna have to do this about fifty thousand times, let's do it in one spot. Besides which, with any luck there'll be coffee for the people who drink it."
    Reilly, Felix, Candy, Rick, Adam, Eve (who was flown in by Powerhouse)—everyone on the East Coast with an interest in what had happened to the team gathered in the K. Robeson conference room. Scott considered expanding the place, if the team ever had any money, and looked around at the crowd. "Okay..."
    "I would stand up and give you a hug, Adam, but these don't seem to be working these days," Eve told him, patting her knee. He leaned down and gave her one instead, startled despite himself to see her so aged.
    "Hey, Scott, how are you?" Powerhouse yelled cheerfully.
    "Good."
    "I had to kill a dragon a little while ago, I am assuming you guys were connected with that somehow?"
    "Oh, is that where that went."
    "... He says blithely. Caused no end of consternation."
    "Well, we took care of the other two," Talon informed him.
    "Needle was able to make it go away, but we weren't sure where away was. But away wasn't eating our head, and since there were two other dragons... three was a bit much."
    "You guys didn't have to deal with a big, six-armed, snake-woman daemon did you?" Talon asked.
    "No." Powerhouse shook his head.
    "Okay, that away wasn't here, then. Good." Scott would have sighed with relief if he breathed.
    "Speaking of which, where is Needle?" Reilly wanted to know.
    "Let's take this from the top." Phoenix Talon took a breath. "All right. We were fighting a sorceress, called—actually we were fighting the League of Nation" (he remembered that, now) "—we were fighting a sorceress named Gretchen. We fought her before. She was the first villain we ever fought actually. And she kidnapped Dawn and used Dawn to rewrite everything so it was like a big Dungeons and Dragons game. Wasn't funny to be in it, let me tell you. We had to defeat Gretchen, which we did after... aye-yi-yi."
    "It was about fifty years our time," Scott put in. "My time."
    "Now in the process it looks like we took some casualties. Dawn didn't come back. Thunderbolt didn't come back. Needle didn't come back. Stephanie didn't come back."
    "What?" That one threw Felix. He had been at this long enough that he wasn't particularly worried about the missing Revolution members; they would turn up. But Stephanie....
    "Stephanie was with Thunderbolt," Scott confirmed.
    "Stephanie was a cat, actually. No, I'm not kidding," Phoenix added. "No metaphor, nothing. Cat. It seems like a dream now... Thunderbolt was a wizard, and Stephanie was his familiar...? Why wouldn't they come back? Although on the other hand, it's hard to tell. I guess a couple other people died. Whoever turned into the gnolls and stuff, they would have died, but presumably they came back. We'll have to check around. But in any case, Dawn... I don't know, is probably gone for good. She was a little too much for this world."
    "Probably true," Scott agreed.
    "Gretchen's dead. The only good thing that came out of this. Oh, and maybe we got a new headquarters."
    "Well." Reilly looked a bit stunned.
    "Certainly a lot to take in," Eve nodded.
    "So the three days of lost time that we experienced here, that...."
    "Was a lot more on the other end, let me tell you," Talon nodded.
    "...Seem awfully fuzzy, correspond with the three days there was a big dome around the city. But it was fifty years?"
    "Yeah," Scott told him.
    "Oh, and there wasn't any moon, either," Talon remembered. "Gretchen destroyed the moon. I was never really clear on that, why did Gretchen destroy the moon?"
    Someone knocked on the front door. Scott sent a tendril out and said, "Oh, hello," to Chandler.
    "Sorry it took me so long to get here. Gretchen destroyed the moon because it's the incarnation of the god who—"
    Talon shut him up with a big hug. "Where have you been?!"
    "Trying to make sure that this didn't happen. I'm afraid I didn't do very well."
    
    

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