Chapter 24

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Flashback: Story Day Thirteen, April 18th 2011, Monday - Shortly After Rescuing Sveta

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Jared's road trip with his two companions had paused for the night at a small motel in a little town halfway between where he'd rescued Sveta, and where he planned to rescue Canary. He presented each of his companions with a set of the same study manuals he'd given to the Sirens before he'd left, and asked them to read them, saying, "If you read one of these a day, you'll be prepared for the next caper in our adventure. While you're busy with that, I'll have to run along on a side trip."

Sveta had seemed fine with that. But his other companion was emphatically *not* fine with it. She'd tried every form of argument, emotional pleading, and finally begging, to get him to stay.

It had annoyed Jared.

A little clingy could be endearing, but this had crossed the line and become controlling. It was obnoxious and smothering, and Jared would not stand for it. So he'd left them both a note and teleported out in the middle of the night to start setting up difficulties for Coil in Las Vegas.

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After that, setting up Calvert to lose a fortune in Vegas had been fun.

Also a great way to launder money. You spend it fast enough, and it goes all sorts of places before anyone has a chance to look at it too closely and realize those particular serial numbers are on FBI watch-lists, and those bills you've been handling were treated with UV-visible dyes, and had radioactive powders dusted across them, as well as other tracking measures.

Oh, they notice those things, but only about the time it comes to count them, and usually they are far too busy collecting that cash, literally raking it in in some cases (roulette tables in particular were notable for using an actual rake to pull cash in from across the table), that there was a certain delay built-in between you spending it, and their noticing the problem.

One really wild weekend?

On his own Earth, where most money was purely electronic and linked computer networks were much more of a thing (building the Internet had cost a *lot* of money that Earth Bet did not have, between the crashing economy and having to rebuild cities like New York from time to time after those places had gotten trashed by Endbringers. So the Earth Bet version of the Internet was small and puny by comparison, decades behind the one of his own home reality, even for a comparable year), he probably would have gotten caught.

Here?

Nah!

The bandwidth didn't exist to carry enough data that fast, for law enforcement to have anything like the same response time to out-of-state criminals carrying marked money, and disposing of it on a determined spending spree.

Collecting the ransom money demanded for the kidnappings they'd blamed on Coil had been fun, too. A simple matter of casting Lesser Animate Objects, a 2nd level spell nicely within his abilities, had gotten him more than a hundred and twenty little plastic army men moving around, following his orders like the real thing!

Locations so closely observed that it was impossible for a six foot adult male to enter unobserved were simplicity itself for intelligent constructs only two inches tall.

With the Tales of Wood and Stone spell giving him complete blueprints of the areas to be infiltrated, Detect Thoughts to pinpoint anyone keeping watch over the scene, plus Detect Elements, set to electricity, to show him the locations of any hidden cameras, microphones, RFID chips or other tracking devices, as well as the Scent ability to sniff out most chemical-based trackers, and the wizard had excellent information around which to plan the heist, as well as Charm Animal to give him a couple of mice or rats to gnaw a few holes in the right places for access. So Jared was feeling almost as good as Taylor at robbing folks blind with literal scores of plastic pickpockets!

Send the tiny troops in bearing plastic bags to seal the cash inside, so they don't leave chemical trails leading the FBI to your mouseholes, and the authorities don't even know how it had been stolen!

They might well not even know it's gone.

At least, not until they check.

Another mystery, underscoring why Coil deserved that Stranger rating of his.

Anyway, cash in hand, they went to Vegas, determined to lose it all in disgusting displays that mostly served to associate Coil's civilian identity with suspiciously large amounts of what turned out to be marked money.

So Thomas Calvert went there to spend a great big wad of cash that had been demanded as ransom money by the supervillain Coil.

Sometimes you've got to make your hints obvious, and short of having him wear a "Criminal Here" T-shirt, with an arrow pointing up at his face, they were doing it.

Because sometimes not even that will stop a clever lawyer from getting his client off scot-free.

That's part of why Jared had approved of Lisa stealing all of Coil's money, because the less he had, the less he had to spend on the best lawyers who could probably get him off of whatever charges.

In a modern setting, always make sure to compromise your enemy's legal defense!

Even if that was just making sure he could not afford one.

So, after making sure to hit the real Thomas Calvert with a really bad stomach flu so he'd spend the weekend miserable in his apartment - as opposed to out in public establishing his presence as *not* in Vegas, and thereby granting himself an alibi; someone looking remarkably like him took a flight to Vegas, rode a shuttle to one of the casinos, bought for himself a purple pimp suit with leopard fur trim, matching big floppy hat, cane, and completely tasteless satchel bag, then wore it all over the Strip, gambling at over a dozen casinos.

It took Pimp Calvert *very* little time before he was accompanied everywhere by a dozen or so trashy streetwalkers.

It also took him very little time to spend over three million dollars, between drunkenly losing at blackjack, and what he spent on hookers.

He quickly established a pattern of staggering into a casino, drunken or stoned, but not to an extent they'd throw him out, exchange about two hundred thousand dollars for chips, give a handful of five hundred dollar chips to each of his streetwalker friends, then stagger over to the blackjack tables to lose most of the rest.

Cash out, go to another casino, repeat.

Of course, it made Jared physically ill to deliberately lose money - even if it was tying one of his opponents to a rather nasty crime, and disposing of marked currency in the process.

Being marked was actually not that much of a problem for the wizard. He could have dealt with that in so many ways it was hardly worth counting them. But he didn't, because having a Thomas Calvert look-alike spend that marked money established all sorts of ties between him and the supervillain Coil, who'd demanded that money in his ransom letters - Thus involving Thomas Calvert rather deeply in ongoing criminal investigations for kidnapping, and murder (both of which he was guilty of, so the wizard felt no qualms at all over framing him for).

But habits from adventuring and earlier life were deeply ingrained in the wizard, and one did not let go of money without getting something valuable in return!

Booze, drugs, alcohol, but especially sex and gambling... these were basically infinite money sinks that could absorb any amount of wealth yet return only a little fleeting pleasure.

You'd feel better buying a puppy in almost all cases.

And the pleasure from owning a puppy would last longer. Grant you more real affection, too.

He had his Thomas Calvert look-alike do those other things basically *because* they were a deplorable waste of resources.

Of course, it was all a scam.

In order to lay a nice evidence trail, Jared had, the night before that Vegas weekend, entered the apartment of Thomas Calvert, cast a spell to keep him asleep (much more reliable and useful than the lame spell to put people asleep) and made a tofu decoy of him. Then, after infecting the real Calvert with a very fast acting and nasty flu virus, had snuck out with the decoy.

The next day, while Thomas was busy calling Ralph on the big, white telephone, a simple Mage Hand cantrip had stolen the man's smart phone, car keys and wallet, slipping them out the old-fashioned mail slot in the man's apartment door.

It had to be done that way, so the phone's inbuilt tracking GPS would register him as leaving at that time.

The wizard had given these stolen items to the new tofu decoy, and thus armed with Calvert's genuine ID, credit cards, and so on, the decoy had driven Calvert's own car to the airport, and paid with Calvert's money for a ticket to Vegas, then flown there all while the actual Thomas was back home busy practicing his technicolor yawn.

The decoy Calvert then proceeded to gamble the weekend away while the original was blowing liquid kisses to the china goddess.

Of course, Jared's frugal soul still rebelled at the very thought of spending that much money to gain so little.

So he didn't.

They say, "A penny saved is a penny earned", after all. It was amazing how many people forget that, or regard money they've looted from bad guys as 'not theirs' so frivolously throw it away, blowing entire fortunes on trivial, or no, benefit to themselves.

No, Jared was primarily a D&D adventurer by training, whose primary income stream was taking money from bad guys. Once he'd stolen money earmarked for Coil, it stopped being Coil's to his mind, and became his own.

That meant he didn't want to waste it, and framing Thomas Calvert for passing marked money was, to him, of trivial benefit, considering how thoroughly they'd set up Calvert to fall already.

The wizard still wanted to do it, framing Coil was always fun, after all - and one of his major hobbies. But he did not want it three million dollars worth. So the trick was to appear to spend it, and to actually set that marked money loose in the system, but do so without losing any buying power.

So in the first place, Jared had prepared by using Detect Thoughts to track down people who knew all about the security measures implanted in the casinos' chips. Each casino had their own. They were a specific size, but a different weight, heft, and appearance, with very specific colorations, inbuilt holograms, microdots, UV markers, RFID tracking chips, micro-fracture fingerprints, and on and on.

Really, it was enough to make one wish the US Mint tried half as hard to prevent their currency from being counterfeited.

But they *could* be counterfeited. It happened all of the time, and knowing how they secured them was the first and most important hurdle to figuring out how it could be done.

So Jared found the people who knew, and learned.

It was simple enough. Every person working at a casino knew someone who knew more than they did about the casino's anti-counterfeiting measures, or knew who to ask who did. By using Detect Thoughts, he did not even really have to ask any suspicious questions to get the name of the next person in the line he had to follow.

In short order, he had the Head of Security of each casino identified. Then, sneaking in wherever those persons were sleeping, and casting first the same spell he'd used on Thomas Calvert, to keep them asleep, then followed up by a Gossip spell, officially described in the Spells and Spellcraft D20 supplement by Legends & Lairs as "This spell causes its target to begin gossiping relentlessly, unable to reveal the most personal information fast enough. The caster may encourage the target to gossip about any subject that he pleases, including secret passwords, the strength and number of the king's entourage, or the location of traps in the area. There is no limit to the information that the subject is willing to give out while under the influence of this spell."

In this way the wizard was able to learn everything he needed to know rather quickly, memorize it all via the perfect memory function of the Auto-hypnosis skill, then cover up his tracks by casting the Forget spell over the person he'd learned it all from, so they would not even have a sleeping memory of his visit, just in case.

Knowing the security told him where and how to defeat it, as well as interesting facts like what scanners they used to check which types of security features... and how to obtain some of those scanners for himself.

Using their scanners to check his fakes taught him very quickly how to forge what he'd wanted, so as to pass all scrutiny.

All of this was setup, and prepared before the decoy Calvert had arrived in Vegas.

Then, after the decoy Calvert had purchased his pimp suit, Jared the wizard turned himself into a small, white, long-haired kitten, and hid out at the bottom of Pimp Calvert's completely tasteless satchel bag.

Immediately upon entering each casino and trading marked cash for chips, he had Pimp Calvert go through a routine of dumping all of those chips into his bag and stirring them around a bit with his hand, before withdrawing a handful for each of his ladies of the evening. During that time, Jared cast Guidance of the Avatar, for a +20 bonus on his next skill check.

Having a Wilding Clasp on a Casting Glove meant he got to use his favorite staff with nobody the wiser, even as a kitten. Through it, he cast Major Creation, taking less than a second to do so, using Uber's skills at forgery, plus his own frankly ridiculous ability bonuses, plus the bonus granted by his previous spell, to achieve a bonus higher than +50 on the D20 roll for that skill, in making counterfeit chips.

Yeah. There was no way any casino was detecting these as fakes.

With a duration of up to sixty hours or so, he set these fake chips to last for two days, before dissolving when next the casino had them withdrawn to be washed.

The casino would notice those chips disappearing in the wash, and they would go through security checks and records to determine what or who those chips had in common, so could discover who had passed them fake chips, then go over surveillance footage to discover...

Thomas Calvert.

Oooh, sucks to be him, don't it?

Jared the kitten, had meanwhile pulled all of the actual chips Pimp Calvert had received into his own Handy Haversack (shrunken with him via another Wilding Clasp) before casting Major Creation, so as not to mix the real with the fake. Then, since casino chips are legal tender inside of the casino that issued them, he took some time while Pimp Calvert was gambling (and losing) with fake chips, to use a magical set of old style merchant's scales, the kind with two dishes suspended from a balance beam that used counterweights to determine the exact weight of goods. This enchanted version of that device was called a Balance Scale of Conversion, and they were massively useful for exchanging currency.

Any cash you placed on one side of the scales would instantly be converted into a gem of exactly the same value that would appear on the other side of the scales. It could also be done in reverse, converting gems directly back into cash equal to their full value.

The important part to this exchange was that it did not matter the kind of money you put in, it would accept dollar bills, gold coins... or casino chips, where casino chips were valid currency. Then it could turn gems back into any kind of cash you designated.

So, put simply, you put cash in and got gems out, then fed those gems back through and specified what form of currency you wanted to receive out of it, and the device made the switch.

It was, overall, a very useful tool to adventurers who did much traveling, as money changers always took a cut, while the magic device gave you full value conversion from the old into the new currency.

So Jared the kitten magically exchanged perfectly real and legal casino chips for their equivalent value; mostly in the gold coins he was familiar with as a D&D wizard, but also some of the local US currency to have spending money available.

So the actual chips got turned into real money of equal value, while the fake chips went out into the casino, either to get spent or gambled with... or returned to the teller for more actual money.

The casino did not know anything was going on, as they received back exactly as many chips, of the same value, as they'd issued. They even had the same, unique, RFID signals as the originals. Nor would they know anything had gone wrong until two days had passed and they began disappearing from their chip washing machine.

Fine and dandy.

The casinos had three million dollars of his money, and he had three million dollars of theirs. Now he could have left it there. Jared was not actually in the business of hurting anyone but the bad guys. He had no intention of robbing any honest businesses. Unfortunately for the casinos, he had read the thoughts (and heard the gossip!) from their heads of security, and boy! They were rotten!

Apparently it was not enough that the odds favored them, these casinos were all cheating on top of that.

Greedy. So very greedy.

But learning they were dirty did put them firmly in 'bad guy' territory.

So that left them open for retaliation by any sort of adventurer to come along!

The scale on which they were fleecing all of those innocent tourists put most dark overlords on D&D worlds to shame. So since robbing crooks was not a crime, to any proper adventurer's mind, giving them three million while getting the same back no longer seemed like a decent enough return on investment.

So during his preparations he had begun changing that equation in his favor.

One of the easiest things to do, since Calvert would be spending a fortune on prostitutes in order to match the theme of this visit, was simply not to spend money on prostitutes.

Just to have him look like he was doing it.

And it was almost too easy.

Jared had simply extended his preparations by using his favorite staff to cast Shadow Guardians, giving him more than sixty illusions of people that were real enough nobody was ever likely to know the difference. Even if you *knew* they were illusions, the shadow magic involved in their creation still made them 50% real, so even knowing they were fakes, they could still beat you up, lift trays, move chairs, drink from glasses, and so on, just like real people could.

That capability to affect the real world around them also, coincidentally, made them really hard to detect as fakes. And the duration was also long enough that, with his artificially inflated, sky-high caster level, they would last all weekend, with a comfortable margin for error on either side.

In search of anonymity, he based these illusions of people on the high school yearbook photos of sixty women selected at random out of the US House of Representatives.

As for finding those photos? Well, it was amazing what flotsam you could pull out of the sea in a ratty old backpack.

He figured, at an average age of fifty-seven, nobody had seen those women's high school looks in roughly forty years, so it was about as anonymous as it gets. Slather on makeup, and make them dress like cheap prostitutes, and...

... well, one could *hope* that would make them *less* recognizable, but with US politicians, one could never be sure.

Anyway, dressed the part, these illusions of people could fake being prostitutes and latch onto Pimp Calvert quickly, then accompany him around as he lavishly spent money on them, then simply keep the money, returning it to Jared later, before they vanished at the end of the spell's duration.

They would enter the casinos with Pimp Calvert, accept their handfuls of five hundred dollar chips (purple, just like his pimp suit!) and then make a few small bets, make one or two small purchases, but spend most of their time hanging around their pimp daddy, then cash out the rest when they left.

At which point, that money has now been laundered. Pimp Calvert gave marked cash to the casino tellers in order to receive gambling chips, spent chips in a wild and uncontrolled fashion, then the streetwalkers he'd spent a good chunk of it on held onto it, in order to receive fresh, non-marked cash back when they checked out.

Casino limits were you had to show ID to process any amount of $10,000 US dollars or more, but so long as they stayed under that amount per casino visit, and did not buy alcohol, the illusory prostitutes never had to show ID.

The casinos probably didn't really check closely on prostitutes' IDs because a number are underage. So it was actually not unusual for streetwalkers to trade a few chips back and forth among them so they all stayed under that limit.

The casinos, seeing those 'girls' as simple parasites on the real spender, paid no particular attention to them, so for the most part they passed under the radar, so to speak.

Those particular illusions of people would also never be returning to Vegas again, so records made on their appearances and so on did not really matter.

Of course, the wizard needed only a dozen or so illusions posing as cheap prostitutes following Pimp Calvert around. The rest he set loose on the Strip in completely anonymous ways, mostly arriving on tour buses, or on shuttles from the airport. For these ones he'd had to arrange for them to have very solid IDs and backgrounds.

But the wizard had those skills. He'd done this before, only with less resources at his disposal the first time. So, while there was a fair amount of work and effort involved, suffice it to say, that part went smoothly.

That was a good thing.

Because when all of these, apparently unrelated, people suddenly began to win big on the slot machines, the omnipresent paranoia of those casinos kicked into high gear, and they were certain there was a plot *somewhere!*

There was, but good luck to them finding it.

Ever.

The feat Fool's Luck could, once a day, turn a failed roll into a success. Not even a reroll, just a flat-out success, no matter how bad the odds on that roll had been.

Through the supplement 'Encyclopedia Arcane: Illusions', Jared had acquired the ability to grant copies of feats he had to his shadow illusions.

Shadow Guardians was an illusion of the shadow subschool. It qualified.

Jared had the Fool's Luck feat, a few copies of it, actually.

He had given a Fool's Luck feat to each of his Shadow Guardians. Each of them had arrived in Vegas by completely normal means, and done completely normal things, then taken a turn at the slot machines, or whatever. Something with a high payout, in all cases.

Jared knew in his own world, one of the record breaking payouts had been over $30 million, paid out from the Megabucks slot machine.

Of course, the odds against winning the jackpot on those was also something like one in fifty million.

But he also knew, in a D&D game, his DM would gladly have called up an electronic dice rolling program and told it to roll a fifty million sided die to see if he won or not.

Which also meant, that using Fool's Luck, he could force a win out of that roll, no matter the odds.

That weekend was very probably the worst in Vegas history, when it came to all sorts of random people winning at all sorts of games, not just the various slots (also called the 'One Armed Bandits' for how they robbed people), but roulette, and all of the games with terrible odds, but multi-million dollar payouts.

Every one to a different dame at a different time, at a different game.

The casinos found it suspicious as anything, and purely hated it. Yet for all of their investigations and attempts to prove otherwise, they found nothing but dumb luck to blame for it.

Of course, they'd checked for every kind of cheating known to man.

Then they did some checks for those unknown.

They called in the Vegas Protectorate, and had them do thorough checking, truth detecting, powers detection, you name it.

Those casinos went looking for any excuse not to pay out.

But they could not find any.

So, in the end, they had to pay.

Still, they did some very mean things, even a few criminal ones, trying not to pay, to the point where Jared had begun brushing off his back-up plan to have his Shadow Guardians all die under 'mysterious circumstances' - with evidence turning up immediately and spreading through news agencies worldwide that the Vegas casinos had assassinated all of those recent winners, of course, thus hitting them far worse in their reputations, driving away all sorts of future customers by spreading rumors that you could not win at Vegas - and they'd kill you if you tried.

Once Jared had resolved to go with Plan B, as he'd called it, the casinos own Thinker-style capes had all of them begun shrieking 'Danger! Danger!' and so they had paid.

They did bar all of those women from ever entering any casinos in the country ever again, of course. And it would take forever for him to collect all of that money, as he had no doubt those casinos would be watching those winners... possibly forever. He also had no doubt any attempt to launder that money would draw their attention like blood draws sharks.

But at least he had delivered a stinging kick to the rear of those evil institutions.

... Oh, and framed Coil for passing marked money, of course.

A man's got to have hobbies!

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When Jared showed back up at the hotel, Sveta had been a good girl, read all of her books, and practiced at the gun range across the street that he'd bought them memberships at. She'd even been cooking their meals, and doing a pretty good job (which she'd done on her own, rather that do the takeout that Jared had left them money for).

In all, he was very pleased with her performance.

As contrasted with the other one.

The non-Sveta girl had been pouting and sullen, and not done anything productive with her time. She had not read those books, just sat and watched television all that time he'd been gone.

Despite himself, the boy wizard had begun to think of her as the Anti-Sveta, as she had wasted most of the money he'd left on having hairdressers, nail salon artists and masseurs come to her in the hotel room, as well as binge-watching pay-per-view.

And yet, the moment he saw her, he could not hold it against her.

He knew, deep-down, that she was trustworthy.

Although, Sveta was awesome, not resenting the non-Sveta girl for making her do all of the cooking and cleaning and so forth. So she was great too.

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Story Day Twenty Nine, May 4th 2011, Wednesday - Morning

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Jared stood behind a desk surrounded by blueprints of a certain, very specific PRT prison, taken via the Tales of Stone and Wood spell cast one floor at a time, giving him complete floorplans and creatures present, which he had been able to refine via Clairvoyance/Clairaudience until he had a complete map of the place, including guard stations, checkpoints, patrol schedules, and the like.

According to Sun Tzu in his Art of War, "The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations."

Or you could fall back on the old standby of, "Knowing is half the battle."

Call him finicky. Call him picky. But Jared preferred winning fights to losing them, and government facilities like this were worse than dungeons in that not only did enemies lurk behind nearly every door (and in the case of the PRT, those enemies were both heavily armed and armored as well as supported by generous helpings of command-controlled traps coordinated from their internal security office that could spray foam - or bullets, at you nearly anywhere inside of the base), but also the minor fact that they would go to all efforts to learn who you were, then never forgive, nor forget you, and hunt you down forever, if possible, trying to avenge themselves on you.

Not very forgiving chaps.

No, not the sort you wanted to make any mistakes against, either. They had a *nasty* tendency of dropping bombs, napalm, or snipers on people they did not like, and doing so during the most awkward moments.

Really, when he'd been brought here one of Jared's highest priorities had been to avoid coming into conflict with the government. He did not *like* them, they were so full of problems it was like a body that was nothing but bruises, wounds, and oozing open sores from the bottom of the foot to the crown of the head, with nothing disinfected or bandaged up in the slightest.

But he'd been fully intending to avoid them as a fight he did not need.

Always be careful to control how many enemies you've got. He'd said as much to Taylor, and he'd meant it.

Governments made for lousy enemies.

Frankly, they were far too vindictive.

However, he had not been given that option. He suspected the Random Extradimensional Bastard having set it up so he found himself facing off against them despite his wishes. Being ambushed by Vista and Clockblocker at the hospital that once had probably been arranged by this enemy to 'keep things interesting'.

On the other side of the desk sat his team.

He smiled as he said to them, "Okay, it's been long enough and we've completed the book work. Very good. Any comments or questions before we move on to the practicals?"

One woman raised her hand. "Can I ask why we are learning this again?"

Jared lifted the short pile of papers in front of him and tapped their edge against the desk to straighten them. "We're preparing for a rescue mission, wherein we rescue Canary. This will be an important mission by itself, but it will also give us experience for some of the other rescues I have planned to follow, where there will be more variables."

"Who else are you planning to rescue?" Sveta asked.

Jared answered, "Well, I have it on good authority that the villain Ravager recently hired the Slaughterhouse Nine to murder Mouse Protector. So if we can get to her first and convince her of the danger, great. Also, if we can find her, I have it in mind to rescue Cherish, who according to Thinker support, is also due to be killed by the Nine shortly thereafter. Something about her being on the run from her father, who sent two of her brothers to hunt after her and bring her back. But on the run from them, she ran into the Nine, and in an attempt to save her life she tried to join up, thinking she could gain control over them, and... let's just say it did not end well for her."

At the word 'Cherish' the new, unnamed party member, got a funny look on her face, but remained silent, though her eyes widened significantly upon hearing of that woman's supposed future fate.

"Bad?" Sveta asked, innocently enough.

"Probably worse than you can imagine," Jared replied. "According to the precog who supplied the data, the story goes Cherish, as an emotion-manipulator, and human-affecting Master, thought she could turn the Nine into her bodyguards to protect her from her family. But thanks to Bonesaw they'd all had cyberware installed that tweaked their natural responses, so when Cherish tried an effect, it felt like the response she'd wanted, but in actuality caused another effect that alerted the Nine to what she was doing. So they punished her severely for this 'betrayal'. As I recall, Bonesaw removed the filters Cherish kept over her power and modified her to only sense negative emotions. Then Mannequin built a prison designed to keep her alive and immobilized indefinitely, then they threw her into the ocean."

Sveta made a face, while the other woman went completely pale, as if with fright.

Odd. What did she have to be afraid of?

Jared scowled. "Things only get worse for her later, as her range still reached the shore. So later a group of desperate people lured The Butcher into Cherish's range, which had been locked into an effect that magnified all negative emotions. Since The Butcher retains the insane minds of all previous Butchers, driving whoever is the current one insane, the effect was magnified by those multiple personalities and The Butcher committed suicide - meaning Cherish became the next Butcher, with all of the insanity that follows."

He shook his head. "Being trapped, helpless and insane? There are worse fates, but not many. Since all that girl was initially guilty of was being a Master, having a bad childhood, and in desperation making a few bad choices - then getting trapped on the Bad Decision Train? Yeah, I'd save her if I could. Frankly, I regard having the guts to run away from Heartbreaker in the first place as a mark in her favor. So she deserves a chance, at least. We'll see when we find her."

Here the wizard scowled again. "Make that *if* we find her. Someone with her powers, already on the run? Our chances of ever encountering her are slim. I wouldn't put money on it - especially not our running into her before the Nine find her. Their initiation rituals alone mentally broke the poor woman - and this disappointed Jack, who in punishment made her do them all again. No, our response if we do find her will in part be decided by how much of her is left to save. This universe seemed determined to Smurf her over to the greatest extent possible, and I cannot say for certain I could fix all of the damage it did to her. So in the end it might be the kindest, gentlest thing is to just let her die. I know in her place I would prefer that to what she actually suffered."

At this, their unnamed teammate had a most peculiar look upon her face.

She was such a sensitive soul... as most really trustworthy people are!

OoOoO

Cherish stumbled around in a daze.

Those things he'd said...

Worse, in that she could tell with her power that he was being quite truthful, and all of his merciful feelings were genuine.

She did not know how to take that at all - to say NOTHING of the supposed fate he'd described for her future.

OoOoO

Rachel's voice called out, "Time for inspection! All of you form up, now Left Face! Everyone inspect the hair of the girl in front of you, make sure it is still perfect."

Standing in a small circle, the girls proceeded to check one anothers' coiffures.

As they were done, Rachel barked out, "Taylor! Progress report! How are you coming on your ability to smell through your bugs the chemicals that signal aggression and someone prepared to do violence?"

"I don't even know how to train that," Taylor protested.

Rachel turned to Lisa. "Lisa! You're good at internet searches. Look up what chemicals identify aggression, and then see if we can mail order some samples."

Lisa nodded. "Got it."

Rachel then turned to Missy. "Missy, you are our eye in the sky. Tell us about the progress of the gang wars in Brockton Bay."

Thanks to Jared's inadvertent suggestion that she could use her power as a 'super-peeper', Missy had worked out how to use her ability to warp space to basically allow her to play 'periscope' all over the city. She had been using this regularly to check on the progress of various hot zones, ironically giving the Sirens one of the better intelligence reports of violence in the Bay.

Since it worked through a series of space-warped lenses, Lisa took every opportunity she could to watch over the former-Vista's shoulder as she did so, giving them her intelligence analysis abilities on top of Missy's new observational ability.

So even small clues had been yielding lots of information.

They were certain Jared would be pleased.

Missy nodded. "Contrary to expectations, the Empire has been living up to their promise to deal honestly with the Asians they are helping to escape."

Rachel nodded. They had all been surprised when the Empire began running something like an Underground Railroad to help Asians to flee Brockton Bay. Although in hindsight it made a great deal of sense, as Lung would not tolerate any Asians living nearby who would not serve him, so for them it was either leave, or be enslaved into the losing army, or die trying to refuse.

So it made sense for most of the local Asian population to want to flee, and it made sense from the Empire's to help them, as anyone fights very hard when cornered and left with no other choice. So Lung's press-ganged troopers had been viciously holding their lines...

... right up until someone had suggested that they didn't want to be here, so why let Lung keep them?

With ways out opened and made easy, many jumped at the chance.

By opening a pressure relief valve, Lung's gang was deflating like a ruptured balloon.

And Lung himself was having trouble. Missy continued, "Lung's latest defeat came when he'd tried to stop the incursion of some of the Archer's Bridge Merchants. Squealer had built an amphibious tow-truck, with a harpoon mounted on the back instead of the usual tow rig. She just pulled up, shot that harpoon right through him, then once those hooks were set in his flesh, same as a whale, she dragged him out into the Bay and dropped anchor - specifically, an anchor with the cable attached and Lung on the other end. It was humiliating."

Lisa grinned. "So, of course, we captured it in full stereo surround sound, and it's up on Pay-Per-View. We have close to a million hits - mostly from displaced former Brocktonites, I am guessing mostly Asians."

Rachel nodded. "Dinah, report."

The mayor's niece nodded. "Today's forecast is 7%, tomorrow's 14%. However, our two-week prospects are 94%!"

An enthusiastic cheer went up.

Dinah had been using her power to track the likelihood of Jared's return.

"Okay, special project reports, and then we'll break for ice cream," Rachel declared.

OoOoO

In his cell, Dennis, alias the Ward Clockblocker, sat on the toilet with his pants around his ankles, a smile on his face as he called out, "Pilot to belly gunner, prepare to open fire!"

OoOoO

"Alright, ladies, just like we'd planned," Jared called out. "This is just a practice excursion to get used to the new forms. So, drink the potions, and let's get started."

Sveta and the other girl both drank the Potions of Polymorph Self he'd supplied them, turning them into Doppelgangers. They had already read a couple of magic tomes, granting them Assume Supernatural Ability twice as bonus feats. That would allow them not only to temporarily look like Doppelgangers, but to take on the shapechanging and mind-reading powers that made that race so feared.

Right now, they were just going to take on an anonymous shape and walk through a mall, getting used to those new abilities, but...

~STOP!~ shouted an entire chorus of mental voices into Jared's mind.

Jared froze, then went on as if nothing had happened, leading Sveta and the other girl out into the mall and doing his best to let no outward sign show as he responded, ~What is it?~

A spokesman responded, ~That woman!~ A clear mental picture showed him which one. ~Has been controlling your mind for over two weeks now!~ A murmur of agreement came from the rest of the telepathic voices over this statement.

As Sveta bought a balloon and the other a corn dog, the youth felt a chill, running a dozen possible responses from instantly attacking the threat, to escape and evasion, to one he'd settled on for the moment - to hide, by pretending that nothing had gone wrong with her control, while evaluating the foe and the current situation.

~How was she doing it?~ he asked, bewildered. ~I have a rather extensive set of defenses against that! Being a Half-Fey alone renders me immune to ALL Enchantment spells and effects! And that's just *one* of my mental defenses!~

~Most mind-affecting abilities are, indeed, enchantments. However, there are a bare few that are not,~ came the reasoned reply.

Jared could sense that they had been working on the hows and whys of it for over the period they said he'd been ensnared. ~Almost all abilities that affect the mind are enchantments,~ he agreed with that, as something he already knew. ~Most of those that aren't are Illusions, and finally a bare handful in Necromancy. But you guys represent a potent defense against all illusions, and most of what's left is Necromancy and are simple fear-effects! Only I am immune to all forms of fear!~ he protested, trying to understand.

~'Twas not an illusion. We suspect the Random Extradimensional Bastard is behind this,~ the chorus responded.

The wizard ran that through his mind, doing several calculations, before concluding they were likely right. Tweaking one of the locals, so their ability counted under Necromancy, and its habit of directly usurping control of the flesh in ways non-beneficial to the original owner, as opposed to simple Enchantment, the comparatively gentle layering of energy fields to (in this case) subtly influence thoughts and feelings, did sound exactly like something his extradimensional foe would do to him to bypass one of Jared's best defenses and entertain itself at his expense.

It was either that, or his extradimensional nemesis had simply selected someone who had an appropriate power already. Given Alec's power to usurp control over another person's nerves, it's quite possible a similar theme ran in his family, for instance.

Come to think of it...

~Do we know her name?~ he asked his mental companions, while subtly observing the non-Sveta girl.

~Cherie Vasil. Though in her thoughts she also thinks of herself by the nickname Cherish,~ came their reply.

Suddenly, he felt cold.

~Can you confirm her power?~ he asked, suspecting the worst.

~Best guess? Emotion Control,~ they answered. ~One of a particularly insidious kind. She has, all this time, been encouraging you to trust her, and to dismiss all doubts as unimportant.~

Jared could recall now, looking back on it, having ignored the mental voices of his own council of advisors, dismissing them just the same way as a man could sleep through his alarm.

How many of their warning signals had he been too busy or preoccupied to notice...? Or, like they said, how long had he been dismissing their alarms as unimportant?

Well, sounded like about two and a half weeks.

~That is disturbing on so many levels,~ he sent back. ~Part of the reason I carry you guys around is to warn me of things like this! I know that! It horrifies me that she was able to override any and all importance I'd assigned to a precaution I'd set up myself for this very purpose!~

~Aye,~ agreed the most senior of those voices.

The boy surreptitiously glanced down at his favorite ring, still on his finger. Having intelligent items in D&D was normally a pain, something almost no one bothered with. However, there were advantages, if you avoid the personality clashes that had been an almost-mandatory fad for a while among the various DMs - one so widespread D&D players now would rather carry a less-powerful, unintelligent item rather than have to argue and plead with an intelligent one.

Nobody liked having to coerce, bribe or browbeat a tool to make the unreasonable thing work. People on fantasy worlds did not want to be forced to engage in arguments, and fight with their appliances in order to make them do their jobs, any more than modern office drones liked having the printer malfunction on them again.

So the very concept of intelligent items, while still present in the rules system as a legacy to previous editions, very rarely got used, as players were almost never willing to put up with one.

But there were a scarce few ways to make an item intelligent, which resulted in a complimentary personality rather than a conflicting one. His favorite ring was one such, an Item Familiar, and he was quite proud of the accomplishments it represented, as well as the power that resulted from them.

On reviewing his situation, Jared had immunity to all Enchantment spells and effects from his Half-Fey heritage. Separate from that, he was also immune to all compulsions, which covered an insanely broad range of possible effects. He had the feats Pure of Heart and True of Purpose, rendering him immune to any spell or effect that would change his alignment away from Good and Law, respectively, rendering entire categories of actions into "Things I Would Not Do" even if gods or artifact-level magic items tried to make him.

Speaking of those frat-boys most pagans called gods, he was monotheistic, worshiping Almighty God, which among other benefits made the boy immune to any and all direct divine action by any so-called deity less than Him.

Which was all of them, frankly.

Another useful benefit was that it meant that he could take any clerical domain that he liked, because they *ALL* represented part of his patron's portfolio.

Yes, even Death and Hell fell under HIS authority. He gave them orders, and they had to obey.

Which they did not like at all.

Moving on, he also had the Pure Soul feat, which made him immune to Taint, which was the D20 mechanic that described all of the "Oooh, this creeping evil will slowly, insidiously, infect you and twist you to evil" effects that were present in horror settings, and the like.

Even if that stuff could not change his alignment, as it was already protected, it was nice not to have his body twisted with deformities.

He was immune to Fear, which covered most of the rest of the possible mind-affecting powers in D&D. On top of that, he had also built into his favorite ring (which he never took off, if he could help it) the properties of a Ring of Mind Shielding, which blocked all attempts to detect his thoughts, magically discern lies he was telling, or sense his alignment; with the ultimate backstop of Protection From Evil, so even if things could get control of him they couldn't issue orders he had to obey.

Then, as if that were not enough, he had built up an entire chorus of intelligent items friendly to him. Being constructs, every last one of them were immune to all Mind-Affecting spells and powers, so could be counted on to keep clear heads to advise him.

So Jared was, in fact, not only protected against magical influence over his mind, he was so OVER-prepared as to make the legendary auror Mad-Eye Moody of Harry Potter fame, whose most famous quote is "Constant Vigilance!" look like a trusting infant by comparison!

Which just goes to show being over-protected can lead to being over-confident, which leads to one being complacent and not devoting the necessary thought and concern.

So, 'Constant Vigilance', indeed.

~But all of that did not block influence,~ he sadly concluded. ~What form did it take? Massive bonuses to her skill checks against me?~

~Basically,~ his intelligent magic items answered. ~As well as crippling circumstance penalties to your checks to resist her.~

The elf rubbed his eyes. ~So Diplomacy, or Bluff in this case I suppose, once more proves itself the most dangerous skill in the game. Her power gave her such huge bonuses that she could *talk* direct to my subconscious and convince me to do stuff I never could have been magically forced into?~

~Basically,~ his items repeated.

~How did it stop?~ he questioned, watching as Sveta, in her altered form, went to get some cotton candy, while the girl he now knew to be Cherish stopped to look at blouses.

~You should know that,~ his kilt chided. ~You have all of the pieces already. Assemble them.~

The elf quickly did so. When did the effect stop? ~The Potions!~ he realized.

~Aye,~ his kilt approved of this quick response. ~When you converted those girls' powers from alien bio-computers to their own, they became supernatural abilities.~

~And you lose your supernatural abilities when you polymorph,~ Jared concluded. ~So Cherish lost her emotion detection and manipulation power when she became a Doppelganger!~

~Aye.~ the voices of his support items all agreed.

Jared wasted no time. Casting a Flatulence cantrip on himself caused him to rip an enormous fart. So it was entirely believable when he excused himself from the girls to go slip off to the men's room, where he got in a stall, cancelled the cantrip, and teleported to one of his underwater bases.

Going up to his Fantastic Device for the Bestow Curse spell, he quickly cast a curse over Cherish that her power would never affect him again.

Only then did he breathe a sigh of relief.

Then he immediately set about casting a few more curses.

OoOoO

Jared teleported back to the Belmont Estate, and tentatively called out, "Hello?"

"JARED!" came the joyful cry, followed by an entire chorus of voices repeating that joyful carol.

He was soon surrounded by shining faces, all standing at a nonthreatening distance and not crowding him, while Rachel, acting as spokeswoman, began, "We would like to apologize..."

He raised a hand, cutting her off, "No need. All is forgiven. I just found out that argument only happened because Cherie Vasil, one of the most potent human-affecting Masters around, had infiltrated our estate, and was trying to get me alone so she could work on perfecting her control of my emotions. So that turned it into a Doppelganger Situation."

"A Doppelganger situation?" Lisa blinked her eyes.

Jared grinned, explaining, "Yeah. We weren't ourselves. In this case, that was because of direct mind control. However, it also applies when you are replaced by actual doppelgangers, or the like. In any case, none of us were responsible for what we were doing, so all is forgiven. It would be evil to blame you for things it turns out you had not willingly done."

"HURRAY!" They all leaped into the air, flinging their arms high in celebration...

...before tackling him en masse.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

Yay! Jared is free!

Yes, Polymorph Self is a 4th level spell, and potions are normally restricted to spells of 3rd level or lower. But there are close to a half dozen resources from different publishers that break that limit. I am not even going to bother to list them. However, my favorite set is in the D20 supplement Spiros Blaak by Green Ronin publishing; their Improved Brew Potion allows one to create potions of up to 6th level spells, while their Greater Brew Potion allows potions of up to 9th level spells to be created.

Potions are still the worst cost-for-benefit form of consumable items in D&D. But they have their uses.

Beta work by Dogbertcarroll