"Stephanie, keep breathing," I reminded her.
    Hm, totally hot chick, also way psycho, my kinda thing, Ezra thought.
    She muttered into Thunderbolt's ear, "We're in the middle of the woods with a giant monster attacking, we just got here, and he's chatting me up! Break his jaw, or something!"
    "Not now. You have to expect that kind of thing, Stephanie."
    Back where we were a few moments ago, a glowing field hit the ground, stretched and moved and finally exploded. Power was standing in the middle of it—the blue figure we had seen before. The glowing field changed back into Mr. Twister.
    "Whoa," Ezra commented. "We have to go faster." He wondered why he was scared; they couldn't do anything to him. Power turned toward us. Thunderbolt watched the rear, trusting me to drive.
    Cockatrice was moving through the woods at about 70 miles an hour; I kept pace. Power threw an energy blast in our direction, trailing a comet's tail of light. It followed us through a slight bank and then hit a tree and exploded. A second one came closer, dodged around a couple of trees before hitting one. The third one came still closer and then fizzled out of existence.
    "Jesus," Paul commented, realizing that Power's functional range was about a half a mile. The energy signal on the blasts was new to his experience.
    "Do I want to know why you said that?" I called back.
    "No. Just keep going."
    "So, what happened to Worcester? Not that we'll miss it," I added.
    "Somewhere in the 2010s as far as we can tell, somebody decided to grant heightened intelligence to pack predators."
    "Oh." Nice.
    "Wouldn't have started in Millinocket," Paul asked. No, but the city was still there and the lumber mills running though it was now in the middle of the forest preserve.
    "So the next thing you knew, giant intelligent carnivorous apes. And wolves, and furry velociraptors."
    "Oh. That must have been fun. Will be fun."
    "Perfect metaphor for corporate capitalism," Ezra muttered.
    We arrived at the Roost, one of the taller buildings (six stories) in what was once the city and from the looks of it rare in having a good degree of structural integrity left.
    "Squatting. Dude, I am right behind that," the Bosonic Man commented.
    Speaking of whom, Paul was picking up an impressive if weird energy signature off the man, while I read a faint bioaura that seemed to be in the process of being washed out by something, possibly the energy that Paul sensed but I couldn't.
    "So. 2086. Nice place," I commented. "If I ask you is time travel a controlled and well understood science at this point, you're probably not going to say what I want to hear, are you."
    "Assuming that you want to hear no, then I'll tell you exactly what you want."
    "Damn."
    "They're still fighting out there," Stephanie commented, standing near the edge. Cockatrice trained his augmented vision in that direction; it didn't look as if the battle was going to approach the tower, if only because there weren't enough of the Force people left to keep it going that long. They looked like they might be doing some damage, but it was hard to tell, and Power was doing a lot worse to them.
    "What's happening? Why are they attacking him?" Thunderbolt asked.
    "They're trying to capture him or destroy him," Ezra replied.
    "Who's they?"
    "They is the Force Industries superteam. Force Industries creates super-beings, they accidentally created me. Then they try to use them, you know, for corporate purposes. But Power, apparently—see nobody knows this—"
    "Power's the blue one," just to make sure he was still following.
    "Power's the blue one. The past couple of months, Power started—at first he seemed like a superhero, he went out and he saved people, then they realized that he was just going after anybody who was using violence. It's like the final scream of the ordinary citizen confronted with the violence of our times."
    "Okay, what's going on?" he switched to Cockatrice in hopes that one would make more sense.
    "Now he's just going after everybody, and he's been out here," Ezra continued, "guess he wanted to stop fighting for a while, and they're trying to get him back in the corral. Or kill him. So Force can cover it up."
    "Oh. So we should go give them a hand," I realized.
    "I kind of hope they kill each other. Really we should probably lay low and see what happens."
    "But you came with them," I pointed out, a trifle confused.
    "Yeah, they thought I would help."
    I bit my tongue.
    "Force created me about two weeks ago, and they wanted me to be part of the superteam. They don't know who they're dealing with."
    "Created you with your permission?" Paul probed.
    "No, it was an accident."
    "It always is," I sighed. Except when it isn't, of course.
    "But I'm really excited, because this opens artistic directions that I'd never even thought of before!"
    "That must be fascinating," Thunderbolt said dryly.
    "And what do you do?" Ezra asked him.
    "Back in 1986 we were part of an organized supergroup, government-sponsored."
    "The Revolution," I supplied.
    "Government-sponsored?" Ezra said dubiously.
    "They paid our salaries."
    "I'll bet they did," he sniffed, mentally categorizing us as fascists.
    Cockatrice, meanwhile, was plucking weapons off the walls and trying to guess what might work on Power.
    "Where did you get all this stuff?" Ezra asked him.
    "I made it."
    "I just want to make sure I get this straight," Stephanie said. "We're in the future. There's a fight going on over the between people who work for an evil military-industrial complex...."
    "Not so much a fight," Thunderbolt commented, glancing that way.
    "Okay. And they're trying to capture the thing that they inadvertently created. Okay. And you," she looked at Cockatrice, "you're the defender of people inside the woods that exist around where Worcester used to be. I got that, right?"
    "Uh-hm."
    "And there's no time travel? I caught that bit?"
    "Sorry," he shrugged.
    "We'll figure something out," I told her. "This is what Phoenix Talon calls the Weird Shit. We just had fifty years of Weird Shit, and it looks like we're going to have a little bit more." Amazing what you get used to, really it is.
    "I just want to point out for the record, that I'm not very comfortable with that."
    "I'm very sorry."
    "I realize that I don't have a say, and we're all kind of here, but... Paul," she said very earnestly, "I'll do whatever you need in order to help get through this, but I'm trusting you to come up with a way to get us home."
    Shit, they are going out, Ezra thought.
    Taken aback by this simple statement, I started laughing and slapped Thunderbolt on the shoulder. "Me, too." Why not? "Oh, one last thing—do the words Gretchen St. John and Xyrgoth mean anything to you?"
    "No," Cockatrice said.
    "Good."
    "Well, I know of Xyrgoth," Ezra said. "An ancient folkloric motif, the wolf-god."
    "As long as that's all it is."
    "What else would it be?"
    "You don't want to know," Thunderbolt and I said almost in unison. "Are we going to give these guys a hand?" I wanted to know. "If this thing is killing people.... Even fascists. Not good."
    "We should just wait," Ezra said. "Maybe they'll get Power."
    "I didn't ask you."
    "Cockatrice, what's your take on all this?" Thunderbolt asked.
    "What I think is if that thing hits town it's going to wreck what's left of Worcester."
    "Do people live here, or just you?" I asked.
    "Hikers come through, some campers come through. There's a colony of hyper-rats over that way."
    "Okay."
    "It took a lot of grenades, but I've got them mostly so they don't eat people."
    "Good job."
    "We should, uh..." Stephanie looked at the window.
    Cockatrice read her thought. "I would suggest get out of the way. Unfortunately there's a whole bunch of noise and loud crashy things, and oh I'll bet you there's a better than fair amount of blood out there, and that means all the predators are going to wake up and come see what's going on."
    

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