Animal Magic Chapter 1, a magnificent seven fanfic

Disclaimer: This story is "fan-fiction", based on the Television programme: The Magnificent Seven, the 1998-2000 TV series 'reimagining' which remains the intellectual property of creators/producers Trilogy, Mirsch, MGM et al and CBS Channel, although whether the latter deserves same after finding that they had a ratings hit on their hands and still cancelling the show...well, 'nuff said.

It is not owned by "The Cat's Whiskers"; no money is being made, and it is purely for the enjoyment of fans of the show, etc., etc. Legal counsel has advised that "fan-fiction" falls within the bounds of "fair use" as defined by UK law (1740) and US law (1976). All 'Original characters, plots and story-settings remain the intellectual property of 'The Cat's Whiskers' and may not be reproduced or continued or expanded without her express permission to reproduce, continue or expand same. The Cat's Whiskers may be contacted at any time via Private Messaging for this purpose. All excerpts of and reference to on-screen dialogue and aired episodes (including deleted scenes, episode commentaries, gag reels, additional content) and on-screen named characters remain the property of the screenwriter(s).

Notice: You are expressly and explicitly permitted and encouraged to save this story to your personal computer and/or device for your personal reading pleasure if you so wish. Some years ago I suffered a serious loss of much of my works due to a computer software malware issue, and luckily I got 60 percent of it back thanks to other writers and readers who had saved my stories on their computers or knew about "web caching". Since I err on the side of paranoia, if I one day need to go through that process again for any reason, you may be the reader who is able to help. Please do not, however, circulate the stories without asking me first.

Summary: A mad scientist believes he has invented the world's first Disintegration Machine. Ezra believes him. They are both wrong. Wackiness ensues, Seven style....

Rating - important: for site purposes only: T+ to M for mild references to illegal narcotics. (I do not believe that written works should be age-rated; it is a foolish and cruel form of censorship that discourages and de-incentivises reading at all, for both knowledge and pleasure which is disastrous for the hope of producing the next generation of Keats, Milton, Twain, Shakespeare, Christie, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Cavendish, Blyton, C.S. Lewis, Joss Whedon, John Sullivan, Ian la Frenais & Dick Clement, James Perry & David Croft, Roy Clarke, Ronnie Barker & Ronnie Corbett, Eric Kripke, Jaime Paglia, Kyle Killen, and so on.)

The above rating is listed so it conforms to ' ' requirements to rate all stories. This story contains mildly intemperate language entirely in context by very stressed people and sundry mild references to violence, drugs and rock 'n' roll, all of which can be seen and heard on daytime soaps (how's that for pre-watershed) by anyone from toddler age upwards. Unfortunately Western social culture today after forty years of the liberal bigotry of Political Correctness is a pornographic and paedophilic society where promiscuity and selfishness are glorified as "good" and self-control, self-respect and personal responsibility are vilified, and as a result most of this stuff is now pre-watershed TV or actually watchable for free as live-action porn anywhere you spot any group of 12-25 year olds at about 11:00pm on a weekend. The content in here is very tame compared to sexting, hook-ups, misogynistic and misandrist supposed 'erotica' and the casual daily porn viewing most third graders and older are now accessing from their smartphones in the school lunch break in between mainlining heroin as an expression of their 'right to self-expression' and dealing smack to the Babies and Toddlers group, because hey, if mum and dad are happy to dose them up with Ritalin to keep them quiet, quiescent and out of the way whilst they focus on their career, retail therapy, golf weekend or whatever's really important, what's wrong with big sis or bro getting in on some of that pocket money supplementing action? I kid you not – according to police research data by 2013 one of the world's most successful 'new' online .com businesses (founded 2011) was "Silk Road" which sells illegal drugs by mail order direct from the manufacturers to any customer who can pay, cutting out the 'middle-man' drug traffickers/gangs/lords. They saw 200 percent growth in the first 18 months of business.

Setting: This story is set in the modern-day Elite ATF AU/MCAT AU. The ATF AU was created M.O.G., whose stories can be found at www (search under Author 'M'). MOG very kindly lets other writers play in her sandpit, for which I am grateful. After 9/11 a spin-off of the ATF AU was created, where the ATF teams became 'MCAT' – Major Crimes And Terrorism Taskforces.

This story fits both; I have updated it slightly since I originally wrote it in 2003 when it was ATF AU, to take place in the 'present' day when the boys are MCAT ATF AU, but that status doesn't really impact on the story.

Unfortunately, I cannot remember the name of the author who created ATF Team 7's closest friends, ATF Team 8, particularly the character of their team leader, Ryan Kelly or other team members such as Khera. In MOG's AU, ATF Director (retired Judge) Orrin Travis originally created ten 'elite' ATF Teams of which our boys were number 7. Travis then refreshed his ten elite teams into MCAT teams in the post-9/11 spin-off/update.

Story content note: As with all my fan-fiction, I have tried to keep this story as accurate as to "canon" as possible. I have no option but to avoid the whole "pot-kettle-black" thing because I teach Creative Writing and wrote a textbook; Writing Fan-Fiction for New Writers (Is it 'Real Writing' and is it Useful?) © C.D. Stewart 2010-2012 and I am, therefore, very keen on 'Taking Your Writing Seriously'. My view is that fan-fiction is an excellent 'primer' for someone who has just started out writing (whatever type) and for anyone moving into fiction writing from another writing field, as was the fact in my case.

If you are writing an AU story, you do have leeway, but otherwise it is only courteous and respectful to your readers, and a good way of honing your research skills, to make as much effort to be as accurate to canon as possible – if you are serious about being a proper writer, you need to learn and practice doing proper research and getting facts right – otherwise you will end up being a "must read" for all the wrong reasons – like people only watch Ben Hur for the centurion wearing the wristwatch, or Braveheart for the battle scene where the man falls over to reveal a pair of very modern jeans under his kilt – or the collectible historical romance set in 17th Century England where the hero invites the heroine to 'freshen up' in his indoor bathroom…with flushing WC.

It also shows your respect to the creators of the show, the scriptwriters and production crew who film the series and work long into the night editing it all together, often in atrocious weather or stuffy little mixing suites but who never get the glory; remember the cameraman and boom operator are also out there filming in the howling gale/downpour for fifteen solid hours and they never get any red carpet treatment. If you've ever gone to a fan convention/Comic Con have you ever taken ten seconds away from salivating over Michael Biehn or Laurie Holden, depending on which way you sway, to let Frank Q. Dobbs or Melissa Rosenberg bask in the fan-love? For another example, all those shows in Vancouver, where the weather is wet or wetter - and the actors themselves, who work very hard and put a lot of time and effort into getting their on-screen characters "right" and again work through illness/injury (e.g., Jared Padalecki's broken wrist in Supernatural, and Alex O'Loughlin's shoulder injury in Hawaii 5-0) or things like pregnancy (e.g., Erica Cerra in A Town Called Eureka) and other stresses to give the viewer good value.

As well as being respectful to everyone involved with the show you are writing about, adhering to canon tropes also gives you great story material. Shows like A Town Called Eureka is very good for giving you snippets of plausible sounding 'real life' Scienceze, without drifting into Star Trek techno-babble. One of the best things about Hawaii 5-0 the 2010 reimagining is that because all the episode titles are in Polynesian, and both Polynesian and Pidgin are used in the show, is that it really makes you think about words and context and language – making sure that character 'A' really does talk like that does a great deal for honing your ear for dialogue and helps you create fictional realisms by giving your characters 'authentic' voices – Danny Williams uses words like 'ergo' and 'commensurately' in context and with precision, even in the midst of a cargument or Danno-rant, but he does not use words (unlike Steve McGarrett/Chin Ho Kelly/Kono Kalakaua/Kamekona), such as 'brah', 'hoa', 'lanai', 'aloha' 'da kine', 'pakalolo' etc.

I have tried my best in this regard, but it has been a bit difficult: dark colours, especially dark eye-colours, don't show up well on screen And of course, that doesn't account for the fact that in Real Life, every person's eyes change colour several times a minute, depending on the amount of literal light reaching the eye, the individual's emotions, their physical level of tiredness or alertness and so on; any accurate/true-to-life novel would never contain anything else other than 400 pages of what colour a person's eyes were every twenty seconds or so. The same applies to everyone else – if you have ever watched any TV shows regularly and then met or seen some of the cast in real life you will know that moment of surprised 'Huh' because the camera really does change how a person's height, weight, body posture, hair-colour, eye-colour, skin tone and voice tones appear to be from what they actually are, as well these also being just as much affected by the person in question being ill, tired, happy, alert, etc.

Credit/shout-out/blame-placement: This story also references, briefly, White Collar (Peter Burke), NCIS: Los Angeles (Nathan Getz), Hawaii 5-0 2010 (Lori Weston).

NB – This story was originally posted on my personal website which became defunct after my ISP turned out to be a nightmare. I have posted it to until such time as I have time to refurbish and recreate my personal website. This story is also posted to the Magnificent 7 fan-fiction Blackraptor site.

And Finally this:

This is tosh - pure, unadulterated silliness. But I enjoyed writing it, so there.

ANIMAL MAGIC

Chapter 1

Ezra flinched and squinted, pain shooting through his skull.

His eyes watered against the bright fluorescent tube light above as he blearily managed to open them. Memory returned with cruel clarity – exiting his sleek Jaguar sports car outside his elegant Denver townhouse home, Ezra had suddenly found himself face to face with a man in a balaclava who'd sprayed him full in the face with what had obviously been a powerful sedative.

Finally shrugging off the effects of his artificialnap, Ezra felt a chill run down his spine. He was fully dressed still, but strapped down onto some sort of medical table that was titled slightly downward reminiscent of the "beds" used by the Minbari in one of his favourite sci-fi shows, Babylon 5. Not that anyone knew sci-fi was one of his hobbies, the one time he'd carefully skirted the issue during a multi-field office seminar at Atlanta, the whole genre and aficionados of it had been sneeringly excoriated by the gathered FBI agents; the sole exception had been a Peter Brent – no, Burke – out of New York who'd quietly admitted a fondness for Star Trek.

Directly in front of the bed was a very large, complicated looking machine, which ominously had a large "nozzle" like protuberance aimed directly at Ezra's favourite stomach. Indeed, the entire room had that clinical atmosphere of an operating theatre…Oh, dear.

A high-pitched, snickering laugh made his tense stomach muscles spasm tight altogether, and a second later, Dr Alfonso Holbachstein crossed his field of vision. Ezra kept his face bland, acutely aware that his situation had just gone from very bad to utterly abysmal. Holbachstein was a brilliant scientist. He was also an utterly mad one. For the past three months, Ezra had been deep undercover as ATF Team 7 had gone after drug lord Leon Gonzalo; Gonzalo, previously a small-time player, had suddenly gone major-league after abruptly starting to supply good quality heroin at much lower prices than normal, making a fortune in weeks. Ezra discovered the secret of his success – Holbachstein, who was quite happily synthesising the stuff by the kilo for a cut of the proceeds with which to finance his inventions – vicious weapons of mass destruction that Holbachstein routinely sold to any person, organisation or nation that could – or would - afford his particularly nasty inventions. In post 9/11 America, that was all the country needed, not.

Josiah had profiled Holbachstein for Director Travis, although the bureaucrats being what they were, a military psychoanalyst, a Dr Nathan Getz from LA, a Navy man, and a Homeland Security lady-spook named Lauren…Laura…West…no, Lori Weston…had also been asked to profile the man as an exercise in pointless redundancy as far as Team 7, and their good buddy compadres Team 8 under never-ex Marine Colonel Ryan Kelly were concerned – what Josiah Sanchez did not know about the human psyche, and more importantly the human soul, largely from profound and not always happy personal experience, was not worth knowing.

The trio of psychological evaluations, although completed individually and independently, were unanimous: totally devoted to his warped view of what constituted pure 'science', Holbachstein viewed the rest of humanity as nothing more than very large lab rats. He had gone totally off his head at the takedown (because the fire fight had bullets damaging/destroying his special inventions and research), which saw Gonzalo die - and it had primarily been Ezra's heartfelt, riveting testimony that got the scientist detained for life at an asylum for the criminally insane.

Now Ezra saw the bruises and minor cuts indicating that Holbachstein had managed to effect escape from his prison but he wasn't that surprised. Even, or actually especially in the higher echelons of law enforcement and the psychiatric sciences, which were far too much ivory tower and far too removed from frontline/life-at-the-sharp-end realities, there still held sway the view that 'white collar' criminals and 'academic/scientist' gone-bad types were more to-be-pitied dorks than viewed as extremely dangerous, completely amoral psychopaths. If eventually recovered surveillance footage didn't show Holbachstein acting all meek and cowed and compliant and then practically just simply slipping out of an unlocked janitor access door of his supposedly 'secure' psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane, he, Ezra P. Standish, would voluntarily eat Buckland Wilmington IV's cooking for an entire week.

Despite his first name, Alfonso, Holbachstein took after his Germanic rather than Latin ancestors: mousy, thinning blond hair and his skin was dully pallid – not the healthy pale of someone who had tan-resistant skin but the greyish tone of someone who spent long periods of time in labs away from sunlight, fresh air and a generally healthy environment. He was very tall, but stooped over, and had a thin, narrow face with a pointy chin, long, red-tipped nose and watery, pale blue eyes, the combination of these making him resemble a rabbit. A very rabid rabbit.

"Dr Holbachstein. How very unpleasant tah see yah again." Ezra drawled.

The scientist glared at him furiously and nodded at the two muscular goons who had accompanied him. "Make sure Standish is secure." Once again he gave that hitching, breathless giggle that was his trademark. "Time to die, Agent Standish. Time to die sooooo sloooowly…the pain will be unbearable, excruciating, agonising…"

Quite sure it would be, Ezra fought back with the only weapon he had left to him – words. Even in the unlikely event that his team mates were right this moment discovering that Holbachstein had escaped from Arkham Asylum-lite and were dashing to Ezra's house, they would be hours too late to save him. But Ezra knew he could take satisfaction in the knowledge that Team 7 would make sure Holbachstein paid for murdering him. He was part of a family. It had been a long, hard road before Ezra accepted it, but now he knew it as surely as the sun rose in the East. Taking a deep breath and ignoring the grinning goons, Ezra gave a derisive snort and cut across the vituperative words, "Oh please, with that? It looks like a giant cake icer!"

Holbachstein stopped and blinked at this temerity. Then he scowled and patted the large contraption. "This? This is my crowning glory! My great achievement, my ultimate triumph…Pah, you are too stupid to understand the genius that led me to it!"

Ezra managed to look singularly unimpressed, which wasn't hard since he a) genuinely had no idea what the machine was, and b) when he looked at it, the big "nozzle" and white plastic computer machinery behind it did make it superficially resemble nothing so much as a large cake-icing machine.

Rubbing his hands together gleefully, Dr Holbachstein leaned close. "This machine collapses the structure of human DNA. In short, Agent Standish, it disintegrates those it strikes. Your DNA will unravel like a ball of twine, every atom in your body will drift apart and you will collapse into less than dust," Holbachstein's face twisted into a maniacal sneer, "but the process is slow, Agent Standish. It will take ten minutes for you to die, and for every single millisecond you will feel the agony as your body is ripped apart, molecule by molecule!"

Even the goons jumped nervously as Holbachstein loosed another bout of manic laughter. Ezra could do nothing as the scientist turned on the machine and it began to hum ominously, Holbachstein turning dials and setting readings. Abruptly the scientist's pocket shrilled.

Irately whipping out the cell phone, the madman embarked on an agitated, one-sided conversation. "What?…No! I'm…yes, yes. Now? Alright!" Snapping the phone closed, the scientist ordered the goons to set up a video camera so he wouldn't miss the demise of his first "test subject". Hitting a final button, Holbachstein and his two cronies had left, shutting the door.

Ezra twisted futilely against the restraints, to see if he could ease his body to one side far enough so the nozzle's whatever missed him – if he could just inch –

With a click, something like a wide laser beam shot out from the nozzle, and unspeakable agony tore through his every fibre…

Continued in Chapter 2…