Our Paranormal Chernobyl: The Summary

Revised: November 6, 2003

An offer she can't refuse

Maggie Thorin, New Orleans hero, brilliant geneticist, and possibly the smartest person on the planet, is invited by Goran Vrlick to help him on a project that he believes will reveal the source of metahuman abilities.

Goran is working for Freya Sontag, mining magnate, telecommunications tycoon, and real estate baron. Freya's five-year-old daughter, Roya, was born a shape-changer, but the girl has no control, and constantly shifts from one bizarre form to another. Freya fears it is only a matter of time before she assumes a shape that will kill her. 

Roya's glands produce a protein that can trigger metahuman transformations. Because the child continuously produces this protein, she continuously changes. Goran, along with assistants Torvald and Anna, is trying to find a substance that will counteract or suppress the protein. The team is following the line of research started four years ago by famous geneticist Cyril Kornbluth. Kornbluth, also funded by Sontag, started his research on animals, but a few of the transformed creatures destroyed the lab. Kornbluth, 87, died before he made much progress. Goran keeps as a kind of lab mascot the only surviving animal from those experiments, the German Shepherd Argo, a talking dog who can only say "Hey." Goran needs Maggie's help to skip years of trials and quickly find a suppressor that will work on Roya.

The morning Maggie and Goran arrive in Chicago, almost two dozen new metahumans appear on the streets of the city, most of them grotesquely transformed. Most of them seem to have been homeless people, and all of them were injected with a substance by B and K, a plastic-skinned nurse and doctor duo who look suspiciously like life-sized Barbie and Ken dolls. 

At first it seems that none of the homeless have survived their transformations. The police  find a porcupine man killed by his own poisonous quills; a density-increased woman suffocated by her own weight; and a hulk-like man killed by his own contracting muscles. Sometimes the cause of death is unknown, as in the case of the "dragon" found dead at the top of the Art Institute of Chicago. The police investigation, led by Detective Hammersmith and his assistant Detective Waters, has discovered that each victim was injected with two pelllets: one that carried dual chemical agents, and one that was a tracking device. 

The Heroes Converge on the City

Other metahumans are drawn to Chicago to investigate. Jonathan Blake, the archer Crossfire, comes from New York because the dead dragon is identical to one in a painting of St. George slaying a dragon—and the armor that St. George is wearing is identical to the armor worn by the knight who killed Blake's parents, Simon and Lydia. Jonathan's mentor, his Uncle Darius (Simon's brother), is sure that there's a connection, and the old man finally tells Jonathan about his "inheritance."

Centuries ago, Darius says, members of Jonathan's mother's family were founders of the Order of St. George. The Order had its Champion, invested with immortality in order to defend the Holy Church. Every age is supposed to have its own champion, but the latest knight hadn't given up the post, and the Order believed the Champion had become corrupt. The Order had the knight buried alive in a secret location centuries ago, and the Champion's armor and sword were hidden in other locations. Darius and Jonathan's father, Simon Blake, had found the sword during one of their adventures, the same adventure where Simon met his future bride, Madeline. Simon and Madeline guarded the sword, and Madeline felt it was her duty to raise their son to become a Contender, a potential next Champion. Each champion has to be the direct descendent of one of the founders of the Order, and has to be born on April 23, the Feast of St. George. Darius hints that Simon and Madeline somehow arranged for Jonathan's birth to be on the right date.

As they fly to Chicago on Jonathan's privately chartered jet, Darius gives Crossfire a special arrow head reputed to slice through magic—a weapon that may be especially useful if he runs into the knight.

Ed, an esper fleeing a chaotic life in Dallas, arrives by coincidence on the day of the outbreak. In fact, one of the first things he sees after getting off the bus is a sculpture of a man asleep on a park bench—and only later will he realize that this is a victim of the Chernobyl—the living sculpture called Fossil (below).  Although all he wants to do is buy a nice suit, go on a job interview, and start a new life in Chicago, Ed cannot stop himself from trying to help the transformed metas. He heads toward downtown and the Art Institute to see the dragon.

PRIMUS agent Laura Pender is sent to Chicago to investigate the Chernobyl, and to become acting Silver Avenger of Chicago (a PRIMUS post) because the current Silver Avenger, Raj Pirhu, has gone missing. The understaffed Chicago station is swamped by all the appearances of new metas, and their resources are further drained because two other PRIMUS field agents besides Pirhu are also missing.

Pender is a gifted field agent, partially because of her talent for detecting metahumans by touch (itself a metahuman talent). She was chosen to lead the Chicago investigation because the rash of bizarre metahumans and their deaths is eerily similar to a case of hers from four years ago. Pender was one of the first agents on the scene to find a secret lab in the southern Utah uranium mine—a mine once owned by the Sontag family. In the lab were the bodies of dozens of "forgotten people"—drunks, mental patients, and homeless people—who were seemingly killed by their transformations into metahumans. The only survivor was Harris DuFord, a once brilliant engineer and longtime alcoholic, who'd now been shrunk to six-inches in height. DuFord told PRIMUS about the B and K, the humanoid robots who'd imprisoned him.

Some of the victims of the current experiment have also survived, and some of them join the hunt for the perpetrators. After being injected by B and K, the mental patient and burn victim Theo August wakes up in an immensely strong and resilient body, but the psychiatrist accompanying him, Dr. Haans, is dead, half-transformed into a thing with moth wings. Theo puts on a metal mask to cover his still scarred face, takes on the persona of Stranger, and vows to hunt down the plastic-skinned people.

Iggy

Crossfire, meanwhile, has his own problems. At the Art Institute, Blake sees a well-dressed young man step out of a limo, and in a flash of second sight sees the black armor superimposed on him.  The man turns out to be Thomas Woodbridge, a man who looks eighteen, but whose demeanor speaks of someone much older. He's accompanied by his female "assistant," Purity, and an older man, Sir Austen.  The group is there to see the portrait and to see the roof where the dragon died. In the Institute lobby, Jonathan accuses Woodbridge of killing his parents. Woodbridge knows who Crossfire is, but tells him he doesn't know all the facts, and offers to talk more with him. Crossfire keeps threatening them.

Ed is attracted to the exchange, and telepathically tells Crossfire to settle down. After trading mental insults,  Ed leaves, planning on getting a new suit and getting on with his life, but agrees to help Crossfire by calling  Darius for him. 

An institute PR person takes Woodbridge, Purity, and Sir Austen on their tour, and Woodbridge invites Crossfire along. When Crossfire threatens to hit Sir Austen, Purity takes Blake down with a martial arts move, and the two stop fighting. Crossfire tries to extract more information from Woodbridge on the roof, but before he gets an answers, a 400-foot, naked black man phases up out of the street.

The giant is Iggy, another victim of the Chernobyl. The man can phase through rock, but finds out too late that he cannot breathe above ground. He passes out, and begins to fall. Crossfire swings down to rescue bystanders caught in the way. Stranger has a similar idea, and saves a cop from being crushed by holding a car over their heads. They survive the impact without a scratch. Iggy, however, is unconscious, but Maggie manages to resuscitate him. Ed, now clad in a thousand-dollar suit, returns to the Institute, and he and Iggy share a promise to meet later when Iggy says he'll know more about the robots.

Stranger vs. Maggie and Q-Ball

Stranger slips away in the confusion. He follows Maggie, Crossfire, and Ed to Mike's Tavern, where they meet with Chicago Police detectives Hammersmith and Waters. Hammersmith tells them about the pellets they've found in each Chernobyl victim. The group decides to split up. Maggie and Hammersmith will go talk to Sontag, and Waters, Crossfire, and Ed will go to police headquarters to examine the pellets.

Stranger, following from the rooftops, sees them leave—but he also sees that he's not the only one following the group. A man in a long leather coat is also shadowing them from ground level, and Stranger decides to follow the follower. When the man in the coat pauses in an alley to make a cell phone call, Stranger jumps him, takes his phone, and presses redial. He notes the phone number, but the brief conversation reveals only that the man in the coat's name is Vito Diamante. Before Stranger can make another move, he's grabbed from above by steel tentacles and hauled into the sky.

Maggie and Hammersmith learn from Sontag that security cameras recorded Goran Vrlick stealing the samples from his own lab the night before he flew down to New Orleans to see Maggie. Sontag has already put Goran "on leave," and she also terminates Maggie's contract. Goran's current whereabouts are unknown.  Maggie suspects that the tapes may have been faked, because why would Goran recruit Maggie right after his crime?

As Hammersmith and Maggie head back to police headquarters, they see a huge white sphere in the air, and Stranger is being carried along by tentacles extruding from it. Q-Ball is both the name of a vehicle—a fifty-foot diameter white sphere with a battery of non-lethal weapons—and its operator. Q-Ball claims it was overhead when it saw Stranger assaulting a man in a black coat, and recognized him as Theo August, the escaped mental patient wanted by the police.

A battle erupts: Stranger versus Maggie and Q-Ball. Stranger flees to the sewers, where he manages to knockout Maggie and escape. Maggie returns to police headquarters to take a shower and take a loot at those pellets.

Hungry Jack and Goo

While Maggie investigates the pellets that transformed the humans, Ed and Crossfire go with Waters to handle another new meta run amok.  Hungry Jack, a man whose gigantic mouth has become a dimensional portal, goes mad in a grocery store when he cannot stop his insatiable hunger. Agent Pender arrives with a team of PRIMUS agents, but Crossfire goes in first, and Ed attacks second, and soon Crossfire is firing flash and taser arrows at Ed for attacking Jack too soon. Jack ends up inhaling Crossfire, and Pender kindly asks the man to spit him back out. Waters and Pender then ask Crossfire to stay out of it. The archer leaves in a huff and heads back to police headquarters, while a PRIMUS agent netguns Ed to keep him out of the way. Agent Pender soothes Hungry Jack, bribing him with hamburgers, and when she's asked all the questions she can, lets Ed knock him out with telepathic blasts. 

Crossfire takes a cab (driven by Eekamouse Johnston) back to headquarters to find Maggie at work on the pellets. The two of them work out a system for tracking the tracking devices, figuring that where they find the pellets, there they might find more victims, and possibly B & K. Working with the police, including Detective Stokel— the walking Keith Richards impersonation who goes by the nickname "Stokes"— they home in on a signal.

At an auto body shop they find B and K, and another victim, Goo, an amoeba-like meta with a jumble of vague memories that seem to come from at least three different people—though he has no idea who those people are. Maggie, Crossfire, and Goo engage in a firefight with the robots. Crossfire is knocked out, Stokes and Maggie are wounded, and B & K escape. Crossfire and Stokes are taken to the hospital, but Maggie, Goo, and some of the police set out to follow the next signal.

JigSaw and Lily

Pender and Ed, meanwhile, have come to an understanding, and Pender thinks the telepath might be useful. While sharing a Giordano's pizza, news comes in to the PRIMUS station that the team of missing PRIMUS agents has been found in an abandoned high school, and the agents who found them are under attack by a meta. They leave in the Silver Avenger's Lincoln Towncar.

Stranger has spent his time since escaping Maggie trying to remove the tracking pellet that is somewhere in his body. He's sneaked into the Cook County General hospital and forced a lab tech to run a full power MRI on him, on the theory that the MRI will disable the pellet's electronics. (As it turns out, he's right.) As he finishes with the procedure, Stranger sees Q-Ball, his personal Moby Dick, heading south over the city. Stranger is sure that Q-Ball is in cahoots with PRIMUS, and follows the ball across the city.

Q-Ball, however, is responding to the same plea for help from the PRIMUS agents under attack in the schoolhouse. Q-Ball and Stranger arrive at the same time as Pender and Ed, and the four of them get in the fight of their life with JigSaw.

Before his transformation, Franklin Regle was a deranged homeless man obsessed with a woman called Lily. After B & K injected, him, his body transformed into a collection of rocky, razor-edged pieces that float and rearrange at will—a body that enables him to enact his most sick fantasies. JigSaw has killed the PRIMUS agents and arranged their body parts into a bizarre puzzle, surrounding Lily at the center. JigSaw has cut out her tongue, but the maimed woman is still alive.  As well as being another victim of the Chernobyl (one of B & K's tracking devices is buried inside her), she is also pregnant and about to give birth.

Ed, Stranger, and Q-Ball manage to knock out JigSaw. During the fight, one of Q-Ball's "drones" is cut open, revealing a six-inch high pilot: Harris DuFord. An ambulance takes Lily to the hospital. The group is joined a few minutes later by Maggie and Goo.

The group convenes inside the Q-Ball, and Harris DuFord tells his story. After his rescue from the first round of experiments, DuFord became a top R&D technician for PRIMUS. He fled the organization after learning that Russell Reinhardt-Mapes, an ex-PRIMUS employee, had built  telepresence machines—in effect, remote-controlled robots— in the style of B and K for a project called "Birthstone." DuFord was told to halt his investigations by upper management, but he continued. One night, DuFord was attacked by another advanced robot called Topaz (last seen in New Orleans during the adventure In Sickness and In Health).  DuFord fled in the experimental Q-Ball. He tells the group that Reinhardt-Mapes, and possibly PRIMUS, may be behind both experiments.

During this conference, Stranger prods Ed into telepathically interrogating a piece of the unconscious Jig-Saw. Ed delves deep and learns about Jig-Saw's obsession with Lily, but then Jig-Saw awakes. Most of the team leaves the Q-Ball to attack the meta. Crossfire makes a timely return from the hospital, and the group knocks out JigSaw again.

Before Ed can withdraw from Jig-Saw's mind he takes on the man's psychotic obsessions and attacks Pender with his telepathic knives. Q-Ball ejects Ed from the ball and rushes Pender to the hospital. After a brief fight, Ed comes to his senses, but the team decides to turn him over to PRIMUS. A PRIMUS containment team arrives, led by an ancient looking dwarf named F.M. Buck. Ed and JigSaw are put into "GodBoxes," metal boxes designed to hold metas and keep them unconscious.

Goo sees the Lincoln Towncar Pender had driven to the school, and recognizes it as his own. A brief musical number later, it's clear that at least one of Goo's personalities was formerly Raj Pirhu, Silver Avenger of Chicago and dedicated Streisand fan. Q-Ball returns to the scene. The group realizes that the pregnant Lily also has a tracking device in her, and decide that she may be the next victim to be picked up by B & K. They rush to the hospital.

Showdown with B & K

In the hospital morgue, another victim of B & K awakes. Eli Masonovitch was a street person and former sculptor struggling with his own personal demons. Turned to stone by B and K, (and later, taken by Ed to be a sculpture), he was recognized as a Chernobyl victim and taken to the hospital morgue. He awakes to see B & K looking at other victims of the injections, including one that's turned into a cocoon (a cocoon that will open in the next Teamups adventure, "Asylum") .  Eli takes on the name Fossil and follows B & K upstairs to extract justice.

Upstairs, Pender is in the same ER as Lily. Lily gives birth, and the tongueless mother is somehow healed in the process, and begins to speak. Lily puts the baby in Pender's arms, telling her the child can heal her too, when B & K burst into the room.

B & K kill a PRIMUS agent there to protect Pender, and then turn on Pender. Laura rolls to cover the baby, but the explosive round goes off, and it's clear that no human could survive the blast. B & K grab Lily and try to escape, just as the heroes arrive in Q-Ball.

A firefight erupts in the hospital. Stranger mistakes the shapeshifting Fossil for one of his personal demons, and attacks the man. Maggie and Crossfire go after B and K. Pender, miraculously unhurt after the explosive round that went off in her back, picks up a PRIMUS rifle and also enters the fight. Pender again cheats death when B's weapon explodes: Pender is briefly surrounded by a sparkling white forcefield, and the explosion doesn't hurt her at all. Maggie disables B with her EMP weapon, but K gets to the exit with Lily. Crossfire pursues and is gunned down; the hail of bullets tear the archer's leg to shreds.

Goo, however, has stayed behind in the Q-Ball, and has noticed that the television truck satellite dish is pointed at the hospital, instead of toward an satellites. Goo attacks the truck and its driver, a young man named Woody, and disables the electronics, shutting down B and K. Goo opens the coffin-like remote control pods in the back of the truck to reveal Reinhardt-Mapes and his lover Margaret. Reinhardt-Mapes, dressed in Power Puff Girl underwear, has been controlling the Barbie-like B, and Margaret, dressed in a tuxedo shirt and pants, has been controlling the Ken-like K.

Stranger "betrayed"

F.M. Buck's containment team helicopter, still carrying Ed and JigSaw in their GodBoxes, arrives. While Pender and Maggie take care of Lily and the baby, and while Crossfire is carted off to surgery, Stranger and Goo interrogate Reinhardt-Mapes, Margaret, and their assistant Woody. Reinhardt-Mapes is not very forthcoming, and is obviously lying through his teeth, but a few things become clear: he hates PRIMUS, and that the point of the injections was not to create metas, but to find a human who wasn't changed by the injections.

Stranger decides that he's tired of the lying, and squeezed Mapes' hand until it turns into a bloody pulp. Goo is appalled, and calls for help. Stranger leaves in a huff. He says he's going to go check on Crossfire, but Maggie thinks he's going to escape, and she asks the PRIMUS team to bring him down. There's a quick fight involving lots of smoke grenades, helicopter mounted sonic stunners, and many titanium netguns, but Stranger is finally knocked out and put in his own GodBox.

Crossfire's parents avenged

Meanwhile, in the hospital parking garage, Darius Blake is having a conversation with Woodbridge, Sir Austen, and Purity in the back of the group's limo. Darius, it turns out, had been following the group since that morning, but was eventually discovered and taken captive. Darius learns some surprising things about Woodbridge, Sir Austen, and especially Purity…

Crossfire comes out of surgery, Stokes next to him, after having a strange dream that hints that Lily's baby is the key to everything. He also awakes with a "second sight"—he can see the souls around him, even through walls and floors. The baby's soul is shining like a beacon in the floor below, and he sees that the Black Knight is heading for it.

Stokes wheels Crossfire downstairs. Crossfire fires arrow after arrow at the knight, which the armored man deflects easily. A magnesium arrow that should have left the man blinded leaves him seemingly unaffected. But instead of attacking in return, the knight explains his motives. He's there to protect the child because his blood is special, and his existence will resurrect the "true" church, whatever that means.

After a lengthy dialogue, the knight strides forward, and knocks the bow away from Crossfire; the flash arrow had blinded the knight, but he distracted Crossfire with conversation until he could recover. Crossfire reaches for the arrowhead that Darius gave him, and thrusts. The arrowhead passes through the armor as if it wasn't there, and the knight collapses. As he dies, the knight charges calls Crossfire a contender, and charges him with protecting the baby. Back in the limo, Darius watches as Woodbridge and Sir Austen turn to dust.

Crossfire opens the visor of the knight, and discovers that is the woman: Purity, Woodbridge's supposed bodyguard. Crossfire has learned a little of what Darius discovered during the conversation in the parking garage. The Order of St. George believed the Champion had become corrupt, but Purity believed that the Order just didn't like that God had chosen a woman for the job, and that she refused to change her moral convictions over time, while the Order itself became compromised. (For example, after the failure of the Crusades, the Order decided that maybe they should stop killing infidels).

The order had the knight buried alive in a secret location centuries ago. Woodbridge and Sir Austen, her squires, were magically linked to Purity, and they lived as long as she did. Woodbridge only recently unburied his master, and Purity's first task was to recover the armor and the sword that was stolen from her. Their job was to carry the the armor and sword until Purity needed them.

Purity is certainly dead now, however. Pender arrives in the basement to retrieve the baby, and takes in the whole scene. Stokes tells Crossfire that he has to arrest him, and knocks him out with a sucker punch. Pender agrees that it had to be done—and then she knocks out Stokes from behind. Pender wheels out Crossfire, leading Lily and the baby to Q-Ball.

Flying to "safety"

Pender, Maggie, Goo, and Q-Ball decide to take Lily and the baby to Maggie's laboratory in New Orleans for safekeeping. Before they leave, Maggie receives a phone call from a frantic Goran. He's in downtown Chicago, and he believes that people are after him. Maggie and Q-Ball pick him up, then fly back to the hospital to pick up Pender, Lily and the baby, the nurse Mavis, and the unconscious Crossfire.

During the trip, several revelations are... revealed. Goran said that after he was fired by Sontag went home and discovered the robots ransacking his house. Goran also admits that he did steal the shapechanging substance from the lab, and that he sold it to PRIMUS. Lily also confides that she was not pregnant when JigSaw captured her. She was a homeless woman struggling with schizophrenia, but after being injected she became pregnant, and now the baby seems to have cured not only her physical wounds (like the tongue that JigSaw cut out of her), but her mental wounds as well. Then Pender takes Maggie aside and tells her something she's learned only minutes ago: when she shook hands with Goran, Pender learned that he is a meta. The two women wonder if the man is really Goran, or if he's had powers all along. They decide to not tip their hand for now. 

Meanwhile, F.M. Buck's helicopter, which is transporting Reinhardt-Mapes, Margaret and the three GodBoxes containing JigSaw, Stranger, and Ed, is hijacked in mid-air by the gigantic Iggy. Iggy needs Ed to track down Sontag, but not knowing who is important or not, takes all the prisoners deep under Chicago, and sets Ed and Stranger free.

Ed mentally interrogates Reinhardt-Mapes, and confirms several facts: Mapes hates PRIMUS; he definitely thought he was working for Sontag, but never met with her directly; the intermediaries were never the same person twice; he did this experiment once before in Utah, as Q-Ball and Pender suspected. Ed also gets the address where B & K were to take Lily when they found her. Unfortunately, Ed has spent a little too much time inside the paranoid funhouse that is Mapes' mind, and when the telepath breaks contact, he's sure that Stranger is attacking him. Iggy separates Stranger and Ed into two caves, and heads off to the address Ed provided.

The Q-Ball arrives in New Orleans, and Maggie lets the group into her forcefield- and Mitrhalite-fortified lab. Pender asks Goran about Freya's personality: "What kind of person would terrorize a city to serve her own needs? What kind of despicable, evil person is she? I'm surprised a woman that vile could care about anything, even her own disfigured daughter."

And Goran smiles.

Showdown

"Goran" is revealed to be Freya Sontag, shapechanger. Sontag first blinds Maggie with a spray of venom, and then goes after Pender and Goo, constantly shifting her body into armored and edged forms. Pender's forcefield repeatedly saves her from damage, but the agent needs to get to her BrickBreaker to do any damage. Goo, not a bad shapechanger himself, spars with Sontag, but takes severe damage on her quills. Maggie crawls blindly toward the closet containing experimental versions of her armor and begins to load up. As if things weren't bad enough, the intruder alarms sound: someone is trying to break into the lab from the outside.

The intruders, however, turn out to be Stranger, Ed, the real Goran, and Argo the Talking Dog. Iggy had gone to the address Ed had retrieved from Rienhardt-Mapes' mind and found that Argo had already rescued Goran, who was being held by Diamante. Argo, it turns out, can say more than "hey." The dog is the first survivor of the experiments with Roya's formula, and has hid its intelligence for years. The dog is also able to psychically track people, which is how he found Goran, and how he knows that Sontag is heading south with Maggie. Goran tells them about Sontag's jet at Midway, and the group hijacks the plane and forces the pilot to take them to New Orleans.

Once there, though, Maggie's lab defenses slow them from getting inside. Stranger continues to hammer his way through layers of Mitrhalite, but it's taking too long. Using Argo's psychic nose as a conduit, Ed "sees" into the room, and telepathically contacts Pender. Pender refuses to let them in however, figuring that they don't need the help of two psychopaths. Maggie, now able to see, uses several of her new toys, to little visible effect, until she's almost knocked out by Sontag's blade-arm. Pender manages to do damage with the BrickBreaker, before Sontag slices the weapon in half.

Goo presses the attack. He throws Sontag around and taunts her with the image of Roya, and Sontag reminds the creature that she already tried to kill him once. Goo remembers being Raj Pirhu, and how Raj "died." The Silver Avenger was tracking down a weapons leak in his headquarters, and came across Sontag (in the form of a black woman) and B & K buying weapons and ammo from one of Raj's employees. Raj was captured and about to be killed, and in a last-resort move injected himself with the Roya formula. He transformed into a gray goo. Sontag, B, and K all assumed he was dead, not realizing that he mutated into one-third of what would become Goo.

With her weapons gone, Maggie down, and Goo making little progress with his taunts, Pender decides that Stranger and Ed are the lesser of two evils. Maggie yells out a security override to open the doors, and Ed mentally attacks the shapechanger through the doorway. Sontag immediately imitates Maggie's voice and closes the doors again. Pender sprints for the emergency switch and opens the doors manually. Ed attacks again, and Stranger leaps in, landing a ferocious blow on the shapechanger. Sontag, in desperation, abruptly turns translucent. Pender turns on the sprinkler system, and the group begins hunting for her.

Sontag attacks from of a corner, hitting Stranger in the face with all her might, and knocking the big man out. Ed attacks again, and senses that the shapechanger is ready to fall, but then she extends her hand into a squid-like web and covers his head and chest. "If anyone moves," the shapechanger calls out, "I'll pop his head like a dandelion."

It's a standoff. Sontag offers to trade Ed for Lily and the baby, but of course no one trusts Sontag, and Sontag doesn't trust them. With each passing second Pender knows that Sontag is recovering her strength, and Ed is suffocating. However, Sontag knows that Stranger could awake any moment, and tip the scales again.

Maggie insists that she wants to save Roya, and that only she has the resources to do that. Sontag agrees that Maggie is valuable, and offers this deal: find a cure for Roya in a week, and everyone lives; fail, and Sontag comes back to kill them all. Sontag refuses to leave Lily and the baby with Maggie, but she will send Maggie tissue samples. Maggie agrees. Sontag orders Maggie to lock herself in an alcove, and seeing no alternative, Maggie complies. Pender extracts a promise from Sontag that she will not harm Lily or the baby, and then steps aside, defeated.

As the shapechanger passes, however, Pender lifts a metal lab stool and slams it into the back of the shapechanger's head. An instant later Argo leaps and clamps his teeth on Sontag's arm, and Sontag releases Ed. Ed immediately mentally blasts the shapechanger with everything he's got.

Sontag goes down, and Pender hammers the stool into her head again for good measure.

Where are they now

The shapechanger was turned over to the Chicago Police, who were ordered to turn the creature over to PRIMUS and Stronghold.  "It" (for there was no way to prove that it was Freya Sontag, and no way to even know its gender) refused to speak, and not even its DNA was stable, so there was no way to tie it to the Chernobyl. It was convicted of attempted murder for its attack in Thorin's lab.

Roya disappeared.  At the same time that the shapechanger had been riding in the Q-Ball disguised as Goran Vrlick, a woman looking exactly like Freya Sontag had chartered a private flight out of O'Hare—her personal jet having been hijacked an hour before by a kid in a suit and a man in an iron mask. On the flight were Sontag, two female assistants, and a "critically ill patient" being transported in a six-by-four-foot container. The pilots never saw the patient. They dropped off the passengers in Brasilia, and from there they disappeared.

Russell Reinhardt-Mapes and his sidekicks, Margaret and Woody Weiss (Woody, it turned out, was Margaret's son from her first marriage), were delivered by Iggy to the front of the Central Police station, bound by lengths of bent sewer pipe. They confessed to everything and swore up and down that Freya Sontag had hired them. They are serving time in a federal prison.

JigSaw, Iggy's other prisoner, has never seen the light of day. A few people know that Iggy keeps the meta in a cave with no light, food, or exit. So far, he's proved as unkillable as Theo August.

Iggy himself has become something of a local saint, protecting anyone who walks the streets and alleys, whether street people or ordinary citizens. His huge figure is rarely seen, but when people see it rise out of the pavement, there is relief, not fear.

Fossil has taken up residence in a small park in Chicago—as a slowly changing statue. However, only Argo, his cabby friend Eekamouse Johnston, and a handful of others know which park, and which statue.

Hungry Jack is leading a better life. After the PRIMUS scientists taught him to switch off the dimensional portal between his teeth and his gullet, Jack was finally able to get food to his stomach and satisfy his raging hunger. The judge had sentenced him only to 500 hours of community service, and he'd proved remarkably effective at clearing abandoned lots for the city.

Stranger disappeared into the sewers of Chicago, only emerging occasionally. Last Halloween, he went trick-or-treating at his former psychiatric hospital. Evidently he thought no one would look twice at another guy in a mask. He "freed" the patients, though most of them didn't want to leave. SWAT and PRIMUS showed up, but not before he'd gotten a few of them to follow him into the sewers.

Goo met with PRIMUS and debriefed as much as it knows about Raj Pirhu's death, but there are two other selves that it knows little about. After a year, it found the mother of one of his personalities, Mrs. Yan.  No one knows much about her, except that she is extremely well off. Goo still spends some of its time in Chicago.

Laura Pender's career with PRIMUS was ended. PRIMUS needed a scapegoat for the organization's failures in Chicago. Despite bringing the shapechanger to justice, the review board cited Pender's numerous breaks of protocol and procedure (fleeing the city, consorting with criminals, assaulting a police officer, hiding witnesses) as reason for dismissal.

Harris DuFord, Q-Ball, is hiding somewhere out west, but is still pursuing PRIMUS' ties to illegal activities.

Ed left Chicago. During his time inside the GodBox, Ed received what he took to be a psychic farewell message from his grandmother. He said he was going to Florida to find her, and has not been seen since.

Crossfire didn't awake from his coma. He was taken back to New York by his Uncle Darius. Some day, when he is needed again, the Contender will awake.

Purity, Woodbridge, and Sir Austen all seem to have died the true death. The sword carried by Purity, however, is still buried in the floor of the Cook County Hospital basement. Whenever construction crews have tried to remove it, electricity has failed, equipment has stopped running, and workers have called in sick.

Roya, Lily and the Baby, and the Final Solution

Lily and the baby live somewhere in Chicago, under the protection of Iggy. The baby hasn't been given a name, or if it has, Lily refuses to say what it is. Whether the child has anything to do with the "resurrection of the true church," as Purity believed, remains to be seen.

Maggie and Gorin Vrlick worked for months to try to synthesize a suppressor for Roya, often using tissue and blood samples from Lily and her baby. They made no progress on the suppressor, but they did discover that Lily's case was even stranger than they thought, and her child's blood was stranger than that.

The two-sided pellets that B & K injected into the victims that night released first the suppressor candidate, allowing it to be absorbed into the victim's body, and then hours later released Roya's active protein. Many would die, and some would survive their transformations, but Sontag had been betting that one of the suppressor formulas would prevent the victim from changing at all. B & K would collect the untransformed victim for further tests, and Sontag would be on her way.

But the experiment was a failure. None of the suppressors worked. Every victim transformed—even Lily.

Before B and K found her, Lily was a malnourished heroin addict who'd been on the street for two years. After the injection, she was hardly any better: her body was still bone thin and ravaged by scars, and when JigSaw cut out her tongue, she was not able to heal herself. But Roya's protein did giver her one remarkable ability, the "superpower" she'd craved: the power to create a baby.

She did it without a father. The baby was created through parthenogenesis, yet it is not a clone: it has it own distinct DNA. She also did it without a uterus. The girl had had a hysterectomy after a botched abortion when she was eighteen. Yet somehow her body created a womb and a placenta for the fetus.

When the placenta detached during birth, some blood must have mixed; this is not rare, and it sometimes happened with mothers with AIDS who pass the disease to their children. The baby may have healed Lily's tongue then. Or maybe it truly was when she kissed the child, as Lily claimed—the mixed blood may have been on its lips. The fact was that Lily no longer showed any metahuman traits, and the child did. It's blood was as protean as Roya's—maybe more so.

The blood was too complex to synthesize, and highly unstable: the transformative powers it possessed broke down hours after extraction. The blood had to be fresh. Also, it was psychoreactive; its affect depended upon the mental state of the user.

Argo had eventually tracked down one of Sontag's offspring (the dog has never said how he did that), and convinced the shifter that Maggie and Goran did want to try to save Roya. A year after Chernobyl, it met with the shapechanger and delivered what it called a suppressor, but what was actually the child's blood, drawn during the child's birthday party. Argo told the shapechanger that Roya must be in a stable shape when she took it, and that she must visualize her final form.  

Argo never saw the shapechanger again, and Maggie still hopes that that is a sign that Roya was finally saved.

END