"I'm just hoping you have an omnicannon in your base," Cockatrice shrugged.
    "We need to figure out how the hell we're getting home," I reminded him.
    "That's secondary at this point."
    "It is?" I stared at him.
    "Um, the cops are coming," Ezra reminded us. "I think that's priority one, actually."
    "What are they likely to do?"
    "First they'll tell us to leave."
    "Okay."
    "Then they'll break our heads, no matter what we do."
    Unlikely. I looked at Cockatrice. "You may have a slightly more objective opinion."
    "Let me rephrase that, they'll try to break our heads. I'm not used to hanging around with superheroes," Ezra admitted.
    "We don't want to have to hurt anyone, but eventually we're going to have to contact someone."
    "We do need to talk to Force industries," Paul opined. "If they are the ones who created Power, they should have more information on him, and help us stop him. We can't let this go."
    I shrugged. If this is the future, in a sense as far as I'm concerned it isn't exactly real, but he seems set on it, and we don't have anything else to do just at the moment.
    "Do you want to get into your base?" Ezra asked.
    Maybe it a was a bit silly, but we were all curious, so we got out and walked toward the door. An electric eye focused on us, and the door opened. The power was on, anyway, and it recognized us.
    As far as Ezra knew, this was unprecedented, but if they were who they said they were, there was another poem waiting for him in there.
    I looked around. "Home sweet kind of home." An empty vehicle bay met our eyes. We decided to look for the computers.
    Ezra stuck his head through doors. "So where were your rooms?"
    "We haven't been here before." There was in fact nothing to indicate our presence except some portraits in one of the halls, which seemed to be a record of Revolution members with their terms of service. The photos had black borders. "This got put in after we left our timeline."
    "Oh. Who was elephant boy there?"
    "I don't know."
    "Fear of commitment?" Cockatrice wondered, looking at Phoenix Talon's picture; his record had a lot of gaps and footnotes.
    "Um, issues," I said. Around 1989 we saw someone in a costume similar to Cockatrice's, with the name Bantam. "Relative of yours?"
    "That would be my grandfather."
    "Oh. Phoenix Talon is going to shit." The heir of the Worcester Rooster was going to join the team? How desperate were we going to be?
    "This is creepy," Ezra commented. "They think you were dead?"
    "I guess so," Thunderbolt replied as we passed slowly along the hall, studying the pictures. Apparently Larry had a kid, since there was an eighteen-year-old who was his spitting image in there. There weren't any dates beyond the beginning of the war.
    We found the computer room. There was some dust, which Ezra transformed into base particles and shooed away. The equipment looked nice, and there were lights. I touched the large main screen, and it came to soft life with a flashing cursor prompt.
    ANSWER RIDDLE.
    "What?" I sighed. "After a hundred years, does anyone know the fucking password?" We all exchanged a look. Someone had left a password in place that only a team member would know the answer to, and of course now no one was left, and it seemed that no one had written it down. The Sphinx would have programmed the system, as our resident specialist....
    Thunderbolt leaned in and typed MAN—the solution to the classic sphinx riddle.
    HELLO. WELCOME.
    "Very good," I congratulated, genuinely impressed.
    YOU HAVE ENTERED SPHINXNET. PLEASE ENTER QUERY.
    Well this was pleasant. "Let see here." I thought for a moment and started typing. "Primary job, find all public and private info re Power. Secondary job, find any and all information regarding time travel."
    "I don't think we have to worry about that right now," Thunderbolt said.
    "Maybe you don't." I certainly intended to.
    "Trust me," he said with a surprising certainty; I gave him a puzzled look. If he knew something, it would sure be nice if he would share it, but there was no time to ask just then. The screen split in two, half of it filling with film clips and other information about Power, everything currently available, including possible identities. It had a list of nine possibilities there, each offering further avenues of information.
    "Beautiful," I smiled.
    For a long time the other side of the screen had only the blinking cursor. Some information about Mobius came up, but we were well outside the time loop he had inhabited, which ran from the 1930s to the late 80s. There was a brief note about someone named January Rain, a member of Flight of a 1000 Cranes, but it also included a death date—of course with time travelers that had a question mark after it. I touched the screen for more information on Mobius, and the screen divided again; this could become headache-inducing. It talked about a team operating out of Harborview, Section 8, and their experiences with a time travel device circa the late 1980s which seemed to have created (would create, from our own home timeframe) Mobius. At the end the device was confiscated by the government and no further information was available. According to the inventor, it was not functional without someone capable of warping space, otherwise you would move in time and be left in the middle of vacuum since the planet was no longer there.
    I must have scowled, because Thunderbolt touched my shoulder and said very quietly, "Trust me, Sasha."
    "Uh, okay...." No one ever uses my first name; they know it bothers me. But then Paul doesn't know about me.
    "We'll concentrate on Power for now. We'll come back to the time travel. You'll have to work with me on this."
    "Okay. You're creeping me out," I informed him, "but all right, I'll go with it for now. Power, huh."
    "This is really weird," Stephanie said, wandering around the room.
    "Apparently at some point after you left and before whatever, you guys had a really good base," Cockatrice said.
    "We rock," Paul agreed.
    "I believe the past tense is called for." I switched my attention to the Power information. Analysis was limited because he has never been captured and indeed seemed to appear and disappear. He's been around for five years. SphinxNet is of the opinion (70% likelihood) that some individual transforms into and out of the Power form. Studies indicate that Power does not have brainwaves in any understandable sense; they tried telepathic contact once and found binary code. Its learning systems are highly advanced; whatever worked against him once will not work again, and it excells at analyzing its opponents' defenses. There is a sensory component to the energy blasts, allowing him to feel whatever it they come into contact with. If something deflects one once, he analyzes it and modifies the next blast accordingly.
    "So these Force guys, they're nice folks, huh?" I remarked.
    There was nothing in the information tying Power to Force directly, though SphinxNet has traced connections to the incubators in Virginia and put Force at the top of the list of suspects. We added the conversations Ezra had heard to its information.
    Another screen opened. POLICE HAVE ARRIVED. ACTIVATE DEFENSE SYSTEMS?
    "Non-lethal only," I told it.
    NON-LETHAL DEFENSES ACTIVE. INCLUDE YOUR SHIP?
    "Yes."
    VISUAL?
    "Yes." I could get used to this. Another screen lit up with a camera feed from the roof. A force field had appeared around the base. The police were on approach and trying to radio the ship we had borrowed.
    "Attention ship, I'm sorry you are in a—" The transmission cut out. "We're very sorry, ship, but we're afraid you've accidentally activated the force field defenses. The last time these came on the defenses stayed extant for several weeks. Hope you brought a picnic lunch."
    Inside, we shrugged. Further overheard conversation revealed that the castle was actually capable of rocket-assisted flight, and they were kind of worried that it might do something along these lines.
    Continuing to work, Ezra's contribution narrowed things down considerably; we ended up with two potential candidates, one with an 85% likelihood: Melvin Dillinger. He's a systems engineer for Force, doing work in their energy weapons division on self-repairing systems. SphinxNet cracked their security handily and plucked out chunks of the actual code he had worked on for analysis. Lots of built-in redundancy, all t's crossed and I's dotted. Unfortunately.
    "That's a neat idea. In many ways very cool," Cockatrice commented. "The initial question comes up, so what would give a self-sustaining energy reaction with a built-in repair facility such a mad-on about interpersonal violence?"
    "Melvin," Thunderbolt pointed out.
    "I'm assuming that the junior high schools of the future are much like those of our own time," I nodded.
    "Admittedly. I can understand the concept of his having a huge and terrible reaction to people beating him up and forcing him to eat paste, but I'm wondering how that got into the code. There's that middle step. When it seems that there's a step missing to a man who makes his living dressed up as a giant chicken...."
    

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