Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing or Stargate-SG1, but if I did, I'd be sitting pretty, believe you me! Anyway, Let us continue with "Nobody Saw This Coming!" (The first part of the chapter takes place in SG-1's continuum
Date: December 1st, 2005
Location: Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado
Time: 20:00 Hours
Place: Brigadier General O'Neill's Office
General O'Neill had actually been having a good day so far. The Replicators had actually been given a serious and well-deserved smack down (hopefully permanently), Daniel had been returned, and no worse for wear, though without any shred of clothing to speak of, and Anubis had been truly put down this time (also, hopefully on a permanent basis). During Daniel's absence, the Replicators had been defeated using the Ancient weapon found on the world of Ta'kara. The Jaffa resistance had taken the holy city of Ta'kara, where the first implantation of a Goa'uld into a Jaffa had occurred, thus beginning their enslavement to the Goa'uld. Jack O'Neill had sung their praises (so to speak) when they finally achieved their freedom. By taking Ta'kara, the Jaffa resistance proved that the Goa'uld were not the all-powerful gods as they claimed to be, and had new converts joining their cause practically everyday.
The Ancient weapon had been adapted to work with the Stargate system. Lt. Colonel Carter, her father Jacob Carter (host to the Tok'ra symbiote Sel'mac), and of all people, the system lord Ba'al, had somehow managed to reprogram the weapons frequency so it only wipe out Replicators, as well as program the Stargate on Ta'kara to dial each and every other gate in the entire system all at once. To put it simply, the Replicators had nowhere to hide. The tiny blocks that made up each unit were fried like the proverbial shrimp on the Barbie.
They still had no idea what had happened to Anubis though. He was thought good and gone when he taken control of Russian Colonel Dimitri Karpov and walked right through the Stargate to the ice world of KS7-535, after some quick reprogramming from Carter. He had actually come back for a bit. There was a rumor that he had actually left the galaxy for a couple hours, but had come back. Thing is, as general O'Neill would put it, he had left in a "big honkin' mother ship", but came back in an itsy bitsy cargo ship, though this one was a slight bit longer and had a more dagger shape to it. Actually, it was more like a personal fighter than a cargo ship.
He had flown straight toward Ba'al's home world, landing in a rugged forest outside of Ba'al's capital, being escorted by Kull warriors. He had been really concerned about something that he had brought back with him from wherever the hell he had been, and had it taken deep into the forest, to a secluded lab hidden underground, accessible only through transport rings that were guarded around the clock by several dozen Kulls. What he had, no one knew, but never investigated as he went on to retake Ta'kara and almost succeeded in wiping out life as it was in the galaxy.
He was just about to pull off a major victory. He had retaken the weapon on Ta'kara and was literally two seconds from pushing the button when he just disappeared, host and all. His super soldiers were left leaderless and incapable of functioning properly. They were quickly defeated. The thing that stands out even more than Anubis' odd and mystifying defeat, was where he had gone for those several hours when he had left in his mother ship, and why he had returned in only a small personal craft. Whatever the reason, Jack was just glad that ol' dog-breath was finally gone; every last bit of him.
Brigadier General Jack O'Neill had no idea how completely wrong he was.
Date: March 15th, AC 197
Location: Ganymede, Moon of Jupiter
Time: 14: 30 hours PM, Earth standard time
Place: Goa'uld Covert Operations Facility, codename: Tantalus
Anubis walked the halls of the recently completed Tantalus facility. The facility was a testament to Goa'uld technology and design. Unlike the traditional hexagonal hallways of Goa'uld palaces and larger space-faring vessels, these hallways were octagonal, made of polished, incredibly resilient super alloys. The ceilings were over twenty meters high, and bright blue lighting strips illuminated the halls from all the wall and ceiling panels. Hexagonal holographic computer terminals further illuminated the hallway, each on the sized of a Pel'tacs main view screen. As with normal Goa'uld design, gold and blue were the theme colors.
There were raised bulkheads that came out of the floor that stretched the width of the hall, ran up the walls and connected at the top of the ceiling, acting like a persons ribs, in what appeared at first glance to be dome-shaped lighting fixtures that were covered in small blue crystals. These were in fact security devices. They fired a barrage of pinpoint plasma bursts at whatever intruder that came close.
Anubis had personally designed those little weapons for security, to supplement the Kulls. Malachi was actually developing robotic security guards to replace the Kulls. While the Kulls were powerful, they were vulnerable to the neutralizer weapons designed to negate the life-giving energies used to animate them; the one thing their energy absorbing body armor couldn't protect them from. Malachi had also been able to rediscover the dimensional drive technology that had brought them to this realm. With the data on the machines the Tau'ri called "mobile suits" and all related technologies, Anubis would be able to produce an army unlike anything the galaxy, nay, the universe, had ever seen before. He would annihilate his enemies, and then he wipe clean the galactic slate, and create life anew, in his own grand image. It pleased him greatly that Malachi had performed so well. It was unfortunate that when he returned to their home reality that his usefulness would be concluded. The Goa'uld as they were would be obsolete in the new order; Anubis' new order. Anubis would give Malachi a quick but glorious end, an end befitting such a unique and loyal being.
Malachi had given him a great gift: a personal craft possessing dimensional drives with temporal enhancements that would not only take him back to his home reality, but also back to the past. The co-ordinates were set. He would appear near the Forge of The Gods and later teach Ba'al a lesson in loyalty, a harsh, final lesson. He would use the mobile suit data if the Ancient device he had discovered hidden within the holy city of Ta'kara for some reason proved unreliable. Anubis chuckled at the idea of Ba'al being crushed under the giant alloy heel of one of those great machines. He smiled a wicked smile, the teeth of his new host gleaming perfectly white, though they wouldn't for long.
He had given his super host to Malachi as a kind of 'going away' present. Malachi had developed a device that allowed him and Anubis to switch bodies. Malachi would use the super host to pose as this 'Damien Jekyll' character that Malachi had concocted. Anubis needed no such machine to switch bodies, but Malachi was not an ascended being, so he required assistance in that apartment. The 'Damien Jekyll' body was more of Malachi's taste, anyway. Anubis would never be able to stand all of the showing off and grandstanding that Malachi had a strange affliction for. Besides, Malachi loved to 'entertain' the women he courted, and required a suitable form. He would at least have some happy memories to carry with him into oblivion.
Anubis entered the surprising small hanger bay where his new ship was being kept. His reflection flowed along the rust colored walls as he walked toward his ship. It stood out sharply, its mother-of-pearl colored hull gleamed brightly in the hanger light. He saw several robotic arms putting final touches on his ship, his insignia brandishing the rear fuselage of the dagger blade shaded ship. He chuckled darkly as the robotic landing clamps released from the vessel with a sharp hiss, the cockpit sliding open silently. He hopped into the one-person craft and took firm hold of the controls. He started the engine, vibrations rattling his bones rather nicely. He activated main propulsion and slid out of the small hanger into open space and away from the Tantalus facility.
He needed no army, no troops, as long as he was not tied down to mortal flesh. He could always acquire a new body when the current host was exhausted. He looked into a monitor to the left of his head, watching the Tantalus facility fall away in a blur. He was truly in awe of the huge facility. In size, it could have been compared to a commercial airliner assembly plant, at the start at least. For over three hundred years, Malachi and he had walked among human kind, working for various high technology companies, trying to develop the means to get back to their home reality. They secretly used resources they gathered to create hidden labs where they could develop what they needed without having prying eyes peering over their shoulders. It took back-alley bartering, shadow meetings, false identities, blood, sweat, tears, and a sickening amount of patience and tolerance, but they eventually got it done.
The facility had been conceived as a means to an end. That end was the repair of their damaged ha'tac. At first, Malachi had used greedy and opportunistic scientists, talented maverick engineers and low-paid, family supporting laborers of every field, some actually taken to the ha'tac itself using one of several cargo ships to work on several vital tasks at once. These tasks were the reverse engineering and rebuilding of the manufacturing systems and the shields. Anubis had wondered why these particular systems, and not the hyper drive and dimensional drives, but he had great faith in Malachi's talents.
They did some studying into Tau'ri culture, and realized that they were going to need money to obtain the resources necessary for the work ahead. Anubis had thought of tapping into the computer systems of various world financial institutions to acquire the funds, and Malachi was eager to test his skills against the defenses put in place to protect the financial institutions of Earth. It was a poor attempt at humor for Malachi. It took him all of five minutes to break the security and encryption codes, change certain passwords and create what he called 'shadow accounts'; these were self-relocating bank accounts. They transferred to different banks by using artificially intelligent computer programs hidden deep within the banks own computer systems, the A.I. programs creating multiple copies before each transfer, which would mask the transfer and erase all records of the account ever being there in the first place, as well as any money transfers into the account.
To further their plans, they decided that since that the completely burnt out drives, shields and manufacturing systems couldn't be repaired, but were replaceable, they needed to create the actual replacement parts. They lacked the facilities on board ship, and Malachi's lab had been extensively ransacked and destroyed by the saboteurs. They gloomily realized that they were going to have to reverse engineer practically everything that had to fixed or replaced; An impossible task if not for Malachi's quick thinking; he did have one invention that was still usable, which was his Kull manufacturing machine.
Malachi and Ma'jel worked long and hard to make as many Kull as possible, a total of over five hundred, and gave each and everyone intelligence on par with Malachi himself, but they lacked motivation, and practically every other kind of personality trait. Once again, Malachi saved the day. He told Anubis that the transporter system was still operating at peak efficiency. They also had working personal cloaking devices, designed to either make a person invisible, or mask the individuals' true appearance using holographic imaging. Anubis broke out into hysterical laughter as he deduced Malachi's plan. Each Kull would be fitted with a cloaking device that would allow them to impersonate any person they chose. Malachi and Ma'jel scanned Earth's 'internet' for weeks, also scanning the computer databases of large multi-national research & development companies and scientific institutions, trying to find suitable candidates for 'substitution'. After the candidates were picked, they were targeted and transported up to the ship while they slept and their brain wave patterns, their very memories were copied and imprinted unto the 'Kull clones' as they became referred to. The Kull clones were, at least in regards to personality, perfect replicas of the people they were replacing. Even the families of people being substituted could not tell the difference.
Sometimes, instead of substituting a Kull clone for a real person, a truly unique identity was created, and copied personality traits were basically mixed and matched to produce unique individuals, all one hundred percent loyal to Anubis and Malachi who could communicate with and control them through long range transceiver implants in their brains. They choose scientists, theorists, chemists, mechanics, whoever they believed could be of use. Their agents were placed at high levels of government, namely military defense and black ops R&D projects, head positions of scientific research institutes and organizations like NASA and MIT, even high ranking officials that sat on the board of directors for many large multi-national companies dealing in technological products, like Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Mitsubishi, and wherever else they could think to place an operative.
Malachi decided to get personally involved with the operation and put forth the idea that he and Lord Anubis become active members in the work force that they could directly oversee all of the research projects they had infiltrated. Anubis flatly renounced the idea, saying it was beneath him to stoop to the level of a lowly worker, but also said that Malachi could proceed on his own if he wished.
Thanks to all of his operatives, whatever research and discoveries made were copied and made to vanish, all of it being brought to secret labs that his Kull-clone workforce had built for him, each and every one disguised as dummy companies. When he actively took part in a research project that suited him, he created a completely new identity for himself. When he had finished whatever work he set out to do, he would copy all of the research material and destroy all of the original material, keeping the copies for himself, and also stole the equipment used as an added bonus. He was able to do the research himself, and much more quickly. He created several dummy companies, and over the decades, shared but a scrapping of his findings with the world. He eventually took all of his companies and merged them into what was now Gold International. Even with all of the resources that he had accumulated, he still needed more workers, and humanity itself was the unwitting supplier of a massive workforce that suited their needs perfectly.
He used greedy and opportunistic glory seekers, Noble prize-winning scientists, and family men, even hotheaded mavericks, whoever were willing to work for him, on his terms. He made them all sign non-disclosure papers, and introduced them to his world, transporting them via cargo ships and troop transports equipped with stealth cloaks. Though he had to do some heavy-duty spin doctoring to keep them from panicking on him and doing something idiotic.
He claimed that the extra terrestrial vessel they were going to be working on had been discovered in the final days of the second Iraqi war, hidden behind the moon, and when space exploration reached its peek, it became easily accessible and was promptly moved to one of Jupiter's moons, Ganymede, and kept quite by the once separate governments of the world. They didn't believe a word of it at first, but when they saw the thirty-mile wide, octagonal disk shaped vessel, they quickly got on board, so to speak.
It took almost three hundred years to get off the ground, so to speak, finally build Tantalus and finish it, and for the last ninety or so years, they've been repairing the ship, taking out the destroyed systems, and replacing them with updated, improved versions of the original systems. Malachi's role as "Damien Jekyll' proved to be most rewarding, indeed. Tantalus spanned outward over three hundred and seventy miles of Ganymede's inhospitable surface, providing the perfect place to land, dock, and begin repairs and upgrades to the ha'tac, one upgrade being that the shield generators could double as projected manufacturing beam devices that would allow them to build whatever they could conceive of, no matter the size, as long as there was an adequate supply of power; it was something they had an abundance of.
As Anubis flew away from the city-sized facility, he activated the dimensional drives and plotted a course back to his territory in his home reality. As the dimensional window burst open in front of his vessel, and was drawn quickly in, disappearing completely from the dimension he had just left, he smirked at the thought of the secret package that was kept in the small storage unit behind his pilot seat. He would create an army the likes of which his realm had never seen, and he would finally reign supreme.
Date: March 15th, AC 197
Location: Earth Sphere Unified Nation Headquarters, North America
Time: 7: 30 AM, Pacific Standard Time
Place: Vice-Foreign Minister Relena Darlian's Office
Relena Darlian had come into work early to get a jump-start on the days activities associated with being part of the E.S.U.N. Despite being no more than sixteen years old, she had quickly risen to the ranks of Vice-Foreign Minister, acting as peacemaker and negotiator between earth and the many space colonies that comprised the Earth Sphere Unified Nation. Where once Earth, being made up of hundreds of separate countries, and the colonies were separate entities, Relena, who was at one time a queen, at first in earnest and later in name only, had taken it upon herself to liquidate all forms of political and territorial boundaries and borders, taking all the individual countries and all related political bodies and formed what became known as the Earth Sphere Unified Nation. This new nation included the orbiting colonies as members.
To say that this idea was radical was a gross understatement. To say that this idea was met with some resistance was also a particularly gross understatement. Initially, the idea of abolishing borders and individual nations had been met with denial, anger, and a lot of resentment. This resentment and anger built up until colony citizens hostile toward this fledgling nation formed a terrorist organization calling themselves White Fang declared war on the people of Earth. None other than the infamous Milliardo Peacecraft had commanded them; a former prince of the vanquished Sanq Kingdom, Milliardo Peacecraft had changed his name to Zechs Marquise, who became an ace mobile suit pilot for an organization called Order of The Zodiac (an abbreviation is OZ). The Organization known as OZ became quite feared, especially with the fabled "Lightning Baron" Zechs Marquise leading their troops into battle.
To make a long story short Milliardo Peacecraft emerged from the shadow of his false self and led White Fang against Earth, in command of a huge battle station called Libra. The legendary Gundam pilots took it upon themselves to stop White Fang and its charismatic leader, but were soon faced with a battle on two fronts, the second being the fully mobilized forces of OZ, lead by equally charismatic, brilliant, and chivalrous military genius Treize Kushrenada. Pulling off what could only be described as a miracle, the Gundams and their pilots pulled it off. They beat both White Fang and OZ, already having earned much fame, whether good or bad throughout the solar system, and quickly became full-blown legends, border lining on mythic status.
There was a legend, more like a rumor that Treize had engineered the entire Eve War to put an end to war for good; peace through war. In fact he did exactly that; engineered the whole war to be as horrible as possible so that the idea of continuing with war would be left in the far and happily forgotten past. It worked flawlessly. Well, up to a point. The biological daughter of Treize Kushrenada, one Mariemaia Barton, had been used, as a pawn by her scheming grandfather Dekim Barton to instigate what became known as the 'Barton Rebellion'. Fortunately, the fabled Gundams and their pilots came to the rescue once again. After the Barton Rebellion, the pilots self-detonated their Gundams, so that people wouldn't have to fear them in the new age of peace.
Relena had been doing up a progress report for the E.S.U.N. president, a Stuart Parnell, on the status of the Mars Terra-forming project. Her brother was overseeing the project, along with Lucrezia Noin, his long time friend and confidant (and perhaps more). He had e-mailed her a video message last week, telling her how things were going great, and that he and Lucrezia were now engaged. When he had spoken, it had been to deliver happy news, but the tone and impression with which he delivered it was most definitely not happy at all. He had left an attachment with the message, but you needed a pass code to open it. Relena thought it was all some strange attempt at humor, but knowing her brother as she did, it was probably serious.
After she had came in this morning, she found a piece of paper with a series of numbers and the words 'to crack the code' in eloquent handwriting on her desk. She had opened her brother's e-mail and looked closely at the attachment. When the pass code window popped up, she typed it in, and hit 'enter'.
She was now waiting for a second video to load and play, the progress report forgotten, as she had received a rather disturbing piece of mail from an anonymous source yesterday evening before she had left the office. It was a letter from a Damien Jekyll, chairman and CEO of Gold International, asking her to join him on the 'Peacemillion II', an experimental space craft that had been jointly developed by Jekyll's company and the man known only as Howard, the man who built the Tallgeese, the first fully functional mobile suit. The letter also said that her brother's e-mail was quite the 'eye opener'. Ever since she had read that last line, she had become very anxious. She had very good reason to be.
The video had finally finished loading, and the face of her brother popped onto the screen, a thoughtful scowl on his face, and a sense of warning in his voice, though it remained calm and collected as he always was. Her brother addressed her.
"Hello little sister. I am truly sorry for causing you to worry about me, but I guess that's just what siblings do, there's just no getting around it. During my time here on Mars, I discovered something truly incredible", he paused for a moment to chuckle, "No, it's not that the 'Face of Mars' is actually real, it's that there is something strange going on. These strange goings on are happening on Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede. The new observatory that was recently set up by Gold International", Relena gasped lightly at the name, "found something truly incredible. Gah! I guess I'm babbling. I have never seen anything like it, Relena, and trust me, when you see the next part of this video, you won't believe it either!"
The video showed Zechs getting up from a sitting position and walk off camera. The picture began to rotate as he changed the angle of the picture. It showed a large plasma computer screen, displaying a view of a desolate moon, most definitely Ganymede. She wondered what was so amazing when Zechs walked up to the computer, moved the mouse about a bit, keyed some commands and said with no room for argument, "Look at this!" The screen showed an area over Ganymede being highlighted and then viewed through a close up. There were several strange, vague shapes scattered through out the blurry image. The image was then digitally enhanced.
"Oh my God!" The clarified image showed a horde of triangularly shaped, ornately decorated vessels, unlike anything Relena had ever seen, heading toward a huge gleaming black mass, almost like a metallic cancerous growth, on the surface of the moon, being escorted by even stranger crescent shaped ships that looked like swooping birds of prey, possibly some kind of fighter escort. But whose fighters were they, and where had they come from, and what were they doing on Ganymede? These questions and more raced through Relena's head, even as Zechs began speaking again. "Listen to me, Relena, whoever, or whatever is behind those ships, they can't be up to any good. Show this to Lady Une, and no one else. Someone may be watching. Keep safe little sister", and with more urgency than before, "keep safe and watch your back!"
The image blinked out, leaving Relena with many questions, and a heart worried over her platinum haired, stoic brother. She gathered up her things, transfer the e-mail and related attachments to CD, and shot out the door, leaving papers and unfinished work to gather dust. Two people, well one person and something not really human noticed her departure. The person was the night security guard, who was just getting ready to go home for the day. He always was amazed at how much energy that young lady had. As he walked down the hall, the second observer, who had clinging to Relena's window like a spider, invisible to the human eye, became visible and pushed off the window. For the few seconds that it hung in mid-air, the solid black of its body armor gleamed in the early morning light, just before it disappeared in a flash of white light.
Wu fei was coming up from behind the huge monster that was visiting Tong, but got a bad feeling all of a sudden when they stopped talking to each other and just gave each other know looks. Knowing looks? Damn it! "Sally! Alexi! Watch out! They know!" Tong leaped over the counter, just as his contact zipped to his feet, his sheer speed bellying his size. The skull-faced dealer somersaulted over Tong and landed not two feet from Sally and shoved her- clear across the street, right into Alexi, who caught her in his thickly muscled arms. She had the wind knocked out of her, and quickly began to recover. Wu fei was about to punch Tong's lights out when a white-hot laser beam lanced out from Tong's prosthetic eye, just barely missing his right ear. Wu fei dove left and rolled into a crouch. Tong looked absolutely furious all of a sudden, as though he had met Wu fei somewhere before, and that meeting had a very poor outcome.
"Hey! Chang! Remember me? I know who you are Preventer Wu fei Chang! The Preventers ruined my life once; I won't let it happen again! Now die, you little shit!" This time, the beam was even more forceful than before. Where before it had been a tight focused pinpoint beam, now it was a stream of concentrated hellfire. The first shot had panicked all of the by-standers into running clear or ducking for cover. 'Not a bad idea', Wu fei mused darkly as Tong snarled angrily, firing again. Wu fei saw Sally out of the corner of his eye. He also caught a glimpse of polished gunmetal. Sally would have no trouble taking Tong down, as long as he kept focused on Wu fei, who was ducking, weaving, and leaping about, trying to keep his hide from being flash-fried.
Tong never saw the gun aimed at his head, or Sally take steady and precise aim. She fired the gun, right on target, but instead of Tong's head exploding in brain bit, blood, bone, and electronics, the bullet bounced off of an energy barrier that had previously been invisible. The barrier shimmered gold, and Tong looked fit to kill, and had every intention of doing just that.
"Filthy Preventer whore! Who do you think your dealing with? Some rank amateur! Bitch! A micro shield generator was installed into my prosthetics the day I began working for my new employer! You can't hurt me! No body can!" Tong's accented voice was already kind of feminine, and now it was starting to turn into a horrid, piercing shriek of rage.
Wu fei couldn't believe it. Tong had some kind of defense shield built right into his artificial eye? That's crazy! The thing should be heating up enough to melt what's left of the man's face clean off his skull! Where were the projector units? How small was it? Where's he hiding it? It should be large enough to seen from halfway down the street! As Wu fei tried to figure out the how's and why's, Tong kept blasting away, blowing stalls, straggling people, anything in sight, to pieces. Wu fei hated weak people like Tong. He couldn't hit Wu fei, so he took it out on somebody who couldn't dodge. Bastard! Not only that, but he hid behind a fancy shield generator and that damned laser eye!
The same could not be said for the skull-faced giant. Sally was unloading round after round into him, but he didn't go down, or even slow down for that matter. Wu fei noticed something odd after he flipped over a coffee table arranged near one of the stalls. The giants' blood was a glossy, almost shiny bright purple color! This guy wasn't even human! This just kept getting weirder and weirder! Alexi had drawn an automatic pistol from under his vest and began to unload the entire clip into the giant. Even that wasn't slowing him down. Wu fei was coming up blank on options, until he remembered that he was wearing one of those wrist devices. He thrust his arm out and concentrated; hard. The device fired off a powerful shock wave just like Alexi had described, which threw Tong to the ground rather hard. The giant hadn't dropped, but did stumble a bit. Wu fei fired a second time. Close, but he was still standing. Third times a charm; he fired the weapon at the giants head, which was snapped back with terrific force.
Wu fei thought the fight was done, when all of a sudden, an equally huge figure in perfectly black body armor, with design aspects that looked like they were lifted straight from Gundam Death Scythe's armor, exploded from within Tong's shop, sending splinters everywhere. The second giant caught the first and helped him to his feet, which were rather firmly planted now, while at the same time raised his arm and began rapidly firing concentrated pulses of wicked energy from a rather compact looking weapon mounted on one of the heavy metal gauntlets he was wearing. The first Giant grabbed his hat and whispered something to the second giant, tapped the lens of the watch he was wearing underneath the cuff of his glove, and then all of a sudden, disappeared in a bright flash of light.
"WHAT IN THE HELL!" Wu fei cursed loudly at the surreal vanishing act the first giant had just pulled off, and began firing off shock wave after shock wave at the second giant. Where the first one was knocked down after several tries, the second giant, who was wearing a very intimidating high-tech armored suit, wasn't even fazed by the weapon at all. The only effect produced was rippling electrical waves across the surface of the armor, which seemed to be absorbed by the armor itself.
'Personal shield generators and particle weapons, energy absorbing body armor, and two giant bad guys that could probably go head to head with a tank, not to mention a cyborg with a laser weapon prosthetic eye! What next?' Wu fei thought angrily, 'One thing is for sure………nobody saw this coming!'
Author's Notes: Damn! The action is heating up, and mysteries and surprises abound, not to mention bad blood! I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and please read and review!
