A/N: Since it would otherwise be three chapters until Victor comes to the rescue, this chapter will pick up after the defeat of Magneto and crew, and then proceed to tell the intervening incidents in flashback, as Joviana explains everything to Victor.

Also, I'm afraid you won't care for this chapter very much, Chantrea. Joviana kicks Toad's butt. (Sorry!)

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Victor and I stood side by side, and together we watched the defeated mutants leave the island for good. It was now Latverian territory; part of the price Magneto paid for his actions.

None of the four looked happy. Magneto was moving various personal belongings to his vehicle, and his face looked like a bad thunderstorm was approaching. The other members of his band were coming out of what had been their main base on the island.

Sabertooth had to be led aboard Magneto's craft, as he was still half-blind. The caustic gel had been formulated not to rinse away easily, and for a while, it burned faster than he could heal. He made a pitiful bubbling sound when he breathed; the gel had worked its way into his sinuses and other soft tissues of his face.

The Toad, who was leading him, had one arm in a makeshift sling, and he was moving like a man who had bruised his coccyx bone badly, mainly because he had.

Mastermind brought up the rear of the little parade, and he was limping. As we watched, he was wracked by a horrible cough, and hawked up a wad of spittle threaded with blood, which he spat on the ground.

"Tell me, my dear, what precisely did you do to them?" Victor inquired.

"It's a long story…"

"But one, I am sure, that will prove full of interest." He looked at me.

"They were expecting a helpless screamer, a victim," I began.

I told him about the Toad and how he had spotted that Malice was no longer in control of me. ("'Doomsie?'" Victor questioned, with disgust and loathing.) I told him all about the blanket, the laptop, and then about the chemical warfare I had waged in the bathroom.

His reaction to that was, "Brilliant! More than worthy of the name of Doom!"

"Thank you." I replied, knowing that he thought that was the highest compliment he could possibly bestow. I then proceeded to tell him what happened next….

I had stopped running once I reached a beach, where I found the first signs of life other than human; piles of seaweed drying in the sun, a very dead fish rotting on the sand, and a tide pool with a little starfish meandering its way around the rocks. I halted there and took a moment to breathe—and to think.

I was overdressed and overheated. A summer day in Latveria is much cooler than a summer day in the Bermuda triangle. My knee length linen skirt was fine, as was the sleeveless knit top, but the long-sleeved blouse of fine, thin, light cotton that I wore over it had to go.

I set down my invaluable bucket with the cleaners in it, took off the blouse, and regarded it for a moment. Then I ripped off the sleeves and tied knots in the wrists. Hunting around on the beach, I found a couple of egg-sized stones, worn smooth by the actions of the sand and water. I slipped one in each dismembered sleeve and knotted the shoulder ends as well. I needed weapons, and they could not have anything metal about them, or Magneto would control them, not I. What I had now was a pair of coshes. If I held one end and swung the cosh, I could do some real damage to whatever I hit, like one of those medieval maces, with an iron ball on one end of a chain, fixed to a strong wood handle on the other. I could probably get in a good blow or two with each before the fabric tore.

Thinking of Magneto and how everything metal was subject to his powers, I then took off both my watch and my engagement ring. I had a mental image of the wristband slowly tightening until it severed my hand…. I tied both items up in pieces of my blouse, separately so as not to scratch the emerald, and put them in my skirt pocket.

I caught sight of myself in the tide pool. My face was as pale as always—and my neck was bare. Malice's choker was gone. I searched the recesses of my mind, and found no trace of her. She had jumped ship, so to speak, and I hadn't noticed until that moment. Had she jumped to Sabertooth, or taken up residence in the bathroom mirror while I was otherwise occupied? Not that it mattered; she was gone, and that was unfortunate. Not that I missed her, but she had been my only source of information about the island.

I picked up the bucket and looked around. Victor had said he was on his way, and I believed in him without question, but there was over two and a half hours until he could reach me. I needed to get out of the sun. Normally I would have put on a wide brimmed hat and sun block with a high SPF before going out on a day like this, on an island like this. Without them, I would burn within 30 minutes, and blister within an hour. Sun stroke and sun poisoning weren't out of the question, either.

Near me, there was a sea wall with stairs leading up to an enormous building, which, once I was inside it, looked as though it had been a temple or a ceremonial hall. It didn't look as if Magneto and his followers used it, or had ever explored it—the floor was thick with sand, silt, and fish skeletons. The tall fluted pillars that supported the dome were inlaid with opalescent shells and glass, in a design at once nightmarish and transcendentally beautiful. Louis Comfort Tiffany would have wept and gnashed his teeth to see that structure.

It was not, however, a good place to hide—too open, too exposed. I had left footprints in the dirt on the floor. It made little sense to disable my enemies' best tracker and then leave such obvious signs of where I was, so I moved on.

I went from building to building, exploring even as I sought a place to wait, a place I where I could best defend myself. It was largely unused; Magneto hadn't done much beyond establishing a base there. It was a terrible shame, for it deserved a team of archaeologists, to investigate and study the historical and artistic aspects of it.

But Magneto owned it, and he would never permit a team of mere humans on it, and as for a team of mutant archaeologists—there weren't any.

There were mutants who could touch an object, and 'read' its history, its origin, its purpose—but no mutant archaeologists. There were mutant telepaths, who could plumb the depths of the human mind and heart—but no mutant doctors who could read the mind of a baby patient, one who couldn't speak yet, and find out just where it was hurting.

Among the innumerable ills the affliction of super heroism has visited upon the Earth, one of the cruelest is what it has done to mutantkind. Mutants are born with powers and abilities with tremendous potential, with possible applications of great benefit—yet, one by one, their best and brightest are seduced into becoming costumed adventurers.

Magneto and Xavier weren't opposite sides of a coin—they were on the same side. Both took young mutants and turned them into warriors. All of their recruits, whether their powers and personalities were suited to it or not, were beaten into swords. All of them—the plowshares, the scalpels, the needles, the pens, all of them. It was a tragic waste.

Mutants will never live in peace with humanity while their leaders believe their best purpose is to become living weapons of war.

While I pondered that conundrum, I located a building that served as the base's storeroom. Food was stockpiled there, as well as other things—like bottled water, for instance. I had been wandering for the better part of an hour, through dusty and grimy buildings, and it was a hot day. I was dry.

I gratefully freed a half-liter bottle from its case and poured it down my throat. As I drank, I suddenly had that prickly feeling of being watched.

If this had been a movie, the creepy music would have begun at that moment—preferably composed by Bernard Hermann, the musician responsible for the Psycho score, and the Twilight Zone theme. While I lowered the bottle and looked around cautiously, it would have built and swelled.

Who was watching me? I remembered the Toad's powers, and glanced up at the ceiling. Nothing. The room hadn't turned into a Dali landscape come to life, so it probably wasn't Mastermind. It was possible that Sabertooth had recovered from my attack to the point where he was after me again, but I doubted it. One go-round per opponent was the unspoken rule of the genre…I was betting it was the Toad.

If he was there, he was hiding very, very well.

I had put down both the bucket and the coshes in order to get my drink of water. The bucket wouldn't be of much use under these circumstances, but I retrieved one of the sleeves with its rock, cautiously.

I could hear a faint noise coming from somewhere close by, to my right. There was a shelving unit with crates full of dehydrated instant dinners, and the noise seemed to be coming from behind it. I inched my way over there, picking my way around a wobbly pyramid of olive oil bottles, sliding in beside a waist-high cracker barrel.

The sound I heard was a faint scratching. It was coming from the height of the second shelf. I carefully peered between two cases, and saw—a mouse.

He had chewed a hole in the side of packet, and was nibbling on a bit of dried carrot.

Everybody knows that when the heroine is in danger, when the music and the tension build and swell up to a screaming pitch, and then it turns out to be something harmless, she relaxes, and the audience relaxes with her. Then the real threat immediately jumps her from behind…

I wrenched the lid off the cracker barrel as I whirled, bringing it up in front of my face like a shield, just in time to deflect the wad of resinous phlegm the Toad spat at me, while I brought the cosh up and around—only to have the knot give, and the stone go flying.

It did hit him in the chest as he did a back-flip away from me, however.

"That hurt." he commented.

I backed up the way I came, keeping the barrel lid as my shield. He followed with a step and a slide, almost a dance step, showing off.

"I'll make a deal with you." I tried.

"Yes—?" he asked.

"I don't want to get into a fight with you. I'm not a martial artist."

"I can tell that." He waggled his eyebrows at me.

"If you pretend that you didn't find me, that you can't find me, then when Doom arrives, I'll tell him you should be spared."

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"What happened then?" Victor asked.

"He laughed, and said 'Let me think.' Then he did this cute little leap, clung to the ceiling for a moment, and told me, 'No deal.' Then he flipped down, somersaulting toward me in the air."

"How did you respond?"

"I pushed over the olive oil bottles. Most of them shattered, and flooded the floor. He was already on his way down, and he couldn't react in time. After that it was like a slapstick comedy routine. He landed on his feet, skidded, and went down. His legs flew up in the air, like a V…"

Victor thought that was very funny. Once he stopped laughing, he said, "As long as your head is on your shoulders, you will never be unarmed and you will never be helpless."

"Thank you! He cursed at me for several minutes. Not only did he land on his tail-bone, but he broke his arm as well. I tied him to the shelving unit with those plastic slip-ties that you use to bundle electrical cords out of the way. I used about five on each limb. Not that he was putting up much of a fight by that time; all I had to do was touch the broken arm, and he was as accommodating as anything."

"That was most ingenious of you."

"Thank you." I replied.

"Come now; tell me how you proved that 'Mastermind' was an empty title."

"I was more concerned about him than about any of the others, barring Magneto himself…"

TBC…..

Hi, Chantrea! Can you forgive me? Pine-sol is a brand name for the first type of cleaner Joviana threw in Sabertooth's face. It has a very strong smell. I imagine that Malicewas involved with him in whatever body she was wearing at the time. I think the real problem with superheroinesis that most comic books are written and drawn by and for men. We need to start a revolution! There will be more romance, never fear!

Hello, Julietsdaughter! Does Victor like or love Joviana? Ooooh! What a good question! And I shall reveal the answer slowly over the course of several chapters.