8~

"You refused to help the great Doctor Quest," Hadji said, settling into his control of Anne. "Now, he is forced to do without your help. But, no matter. His glorious temporal empire will still see the light of day, and with a working time machine, it will be everlasting."

Marcie snapped her fingers. "You see? I knew this was a cult of some sort!"

She then turned to her mother. "Mom, what are you doing?" Marcie asked, suspiciously, looking into Anne's eyes, and not really seeing...her.

Anne walked over to a work table, where two devices stood on wire display stands. Looking like a black and silver-gray backpacks, they were composed of a vertical, motorized carousel, topped with small containers filled with individual chemicals, and a miniature, portable tank. A system of hoses coming from the packs' side, fed a single, large gauntlet with articulated nozzles for finger tips.

With an empty nod of encouragement from Hadji, Anne, mechanically, took one of the packs down and began to slip it, and the gauntlet, on. However, because of her smaller frame, both components felt awkward and loose.

"Put...the other one on, Marcie," Anne bade her, as she walked from the work table to one of the lab's counters. "Hurry!"

Unsure of what was going on, Marcie did as she was told, grabbing the other pack and putting it on. Then, she turned to watch what her mother would do, next.

"Mom, what's going on?"

Anne managed to glance behind her, in their captor's general direction. "My mind...Hadji's in...my mind! He wants me to kill you. I don't...want to. You'll have to stop me."

Marcie didn't like the connotation of the words, 'stop me.' "You know that I won't fight you," Marcie said. Of that, she was the surest of.

Then, to change the subject, while getting some more information about her situation, she asked, "What are these things we're wearing?"

"These were experiments that my floor was working on," Anne said, stopping her inner fight with Hadji long enough to proudly explain. "LabPaks. Mobile laboratories for chemists in the field. Each one has basic chemicals in storage cartridges, a motorized blender system to mix them into other chemicals, and a compressed air tank to send them through the hoses into the dispersion glove. Oh, and they're voice-commanded. My little touch."

A spasm of reinforced control from the Indian, forced the words, "Now, die," to leave her lips.

Anne raised her glove hand at Marcie, and quickly said, "H2SO4!"

The sound of the Pak's small motors heralded the rotating of its carousel, the built-in computer selecting and pumping the correct chemicals to mix and create what Marcie knew all too well.

Anne pointed her glove out, giving her daughter only moments to defensively react.

With a fearful dodge, Marcie leaped to the side, just as sulfuric acid, deadly and corrosive, streamed from her mother's outstretched fingers.

The acid splashed against a nearby chair that stood by the work table, and ate it away to a wilting, smoking heap of bubbling plastic, foam, artificial fabric and metal, its droplets perforating the surrounding floor, and flying towards Marcie, who had to scurry to a far corner of that side of the room, to avoid them.

Hadji took the time to study Marcie's movements, and frowned in the realization that she would never fight her mother, and because of that, would always act defensively, dodging, whenever possible.

'It's time to simply out-maneuver her,' he thought, coolly.

"You proved that you will not harm your mother," the Indian called out to Marcie. "Therefore, I must neutralize your small advantage." He gestured to his temple, and up ahead, Anne stiffened under protest of the new command.

"Noooo," she muttered, fighting against the order that, even now, had her thinking of the formula for her LabPak to create, next.

Under his insistence, she whispered the formula, so as not to tip Marcie off to what the chemical was. She then raised her gloved hand, and pointed it at the cornered Marcie.

A thick, clear liquid gushed from the gauntlet and coated the floor around Marcie's feet, and beyond.

Marcie took a moment to try and deduce what was sprayed. Too viscous to be an acid, she thought, and it gave the wrong odor. However, before she could piece together what it could have been, Anne announced, again, "H2SO4!"

Rather the chemical you know, than the one you don't, Marcie figured, stepping into the translucent fluid, and, to her horror and pain, immediately loosing her balance, and crashing to the floor in an instant.

From the corner of her eye, Marcie watched her mother raise her gauntleted hand, as she tried to right herself against the awkward weight of the LabPak, and the tractionless goo. She didn't have any more time.

An accurate, killing stream flew from the glove, closing the distance to annihilate flesh and bone, and that's when the idea hit her.

Marcie laid back down in the liquid, folded one leg in, and then kicked it hard against the corner wall, launching her body away from the attack.

She was safe, for the moment, but nothing, short of Anne's own willpower, would stop her from firing, again and again. Already, her mother was drawing a bead on her daughter, just as Marcie's momentum began to wan from siding all the way across the room.

Marcie's mind then began to nag at her consciousness over something Hadji had said to her. Something her mind refused to let go. Then, it hit her.

Neutralize...

"H2SO4!" Anne cried out.

"NaOH!" Marcie countered, finally, hearing the motors of her pack mix her potions.

A murderous gout of acid burst forth and stretched across the room for prone Marcie, just as she reached out a hand to intercept it, and a stream leaped out from her glove.

Both streams collided, protecting Marcie, as her weaker base of sodium hydroxide began neutralizing the acid, creating a growing puddle of water, salt and thermo-chemical reactions underneath the battling elixirs.

Marcie, struggling, and finally succeeding, to stand, spared a glance at Hadji, who was now concentrating to maintain his hold.

Marcie could surmise that with mental control, emotion had a lot to do with that control, and she could see him endeavor to keep his in check.

"Hey, Hadji! Thanks for helping me out!" Marcie called out, hoping her taunt would make him loose his hold her mother, sooner than later. "I didn't know that you were a chemist, too!"

"What do you mean, you silly girl," he growled, as he projected a new command to Anne.

"You came up with a great...solution! Get it?" Marcie joked.

"Very...good, Marcie," Anne congratulated. "Now, please...stop...me."

Marcie ran desperate scenarios in her head to do just that. She had non-lethals, like her Discouragers, with her, but she couldn't bring herself to incapacitate her that way.

She soon didn't have time to think on it, before Anne spoke the formula, "HCl!"

Marcie raised her hand in defense of the next attack. "Hydrochloric acid, huh? I'll see your acid, and raise you another sodium hydroxide burst!" A spray of her base, then countered the new acid attack.

And so it went, back and forth. Mother and daughter waging a bout of chemical warfare, as though they were dueling alchemists, calling out their formulae, like magical spells, to the cruel fascination and delight of Singh.

Anne clenched her gauntlet in Hadji-projected frustration, yelling to Marcie, in challenge, "HNO3!"

"Nitric acid?" Marcie deduced, before countering with another base. "Potassium hydroxide! KOH!"

Anne could begin to sense the mental link with Hadji being two-way, feeling his frustration in having the battle last as long as it did. The window of a strategy was opening to her, however unlikely.

"Marcie, I know what you've got in your jacket. Use it! Use it on me!" Anne commanded, nodding at Marcie's chest...and giving her an almost imperceptible wink.

It came back to her Discourager, again, Marcie fretted. She hated having to choke her, but the longer the fight dragged on, the riskier it became for her. She sighed and reached into her jacket, only to stop when Hadji called her.

"Stop, Marcie Fleach. I just read your mother's surface thoughts, and I know what she wants you to do," he warned. "If you use your...what do you call it? Discourager, on her, I'll make her spray herself with acid."

To prove his threat, she automatically raised her glove to her face, fingers pointed at her worried eyes.

"Thus, ending the battle, but not in the way she may have wanted," Hadji finished, smugly. "Now, give it to me."

"What is your problem, huh?" Marcie fumed.

"I have no problem, Marcie Fleach," Hadji said, smoothly. "This is just my way of testing myself, to develop my dispassion for compassion, to please my benefactor, Doctor Quest, and to show all of you, rather ironically, that science is no match for the awesome power of the human mind."

Marcie slowly slipped her hand into her jacket, and took out the capsule. She then tossed it across the room in Hadji's direction.

Hadji raised a hand, and the capsule stopped in its arc, drawn into his palm. He held it gently, rolling it this way and that, in an attempt to understand what it was.

"Look, I don't want to tell you what to do, and all," Marcie pleaded. "But please, don't break it, or anything. It took forever for me to make it, and I can't make another one for a long while."

"So, this a prototype?" he asked. "What does it do? Answer, or your mother won't live long enough to even look like a mother."

"It's a non-lethal," Marcie sighed. "It uses sound waves to put you to sleep, but, I'm begging you, don't break it. It's really fragile."

Hadji gave a confident smile, as he placed the capsule between his thumb and forefinger.

"I'm impressed that you could build something so tiny to stop your attackers. It's unfortunate that your attacker was far more formidable than your little device. Again, the power of the mind gives me what I want."

He crushed it between his fingers, and watched for her reaction. Just as Marcie, eagerly watched for his.

The blue fluid oozed out of the breakable shell, into his hand, and down his sleeve, perplexing the Indian, momentarily. Then, he began to feel a profound cooling sensation run through his arm, as the Insta-Ice chemicals reacted with the air, and started to encase the limb, and indeed, that entire side of his upper body.

"What...is happening...to me?" Hadji gasped under the squeeze of the expanding ice, and its unrelenting cold.

"So much for the awesome power of the mind," Marcie said, flippantly. "Now, release my mother, or by the time I'm done with you, you won't thaw out until next spring."

Fear and confusion replaced the control and power that had previously filled Hadji's mind, and up ahead, Anne's body relaxed, as the Indian teen's influence was exorcised from her, at last.

"How..." Hadji managed to ask, when the ice crawled up his numbing neck.

"Your mental powers were strong. Telekinesis, mind control, and, I suspect, telepathy, as well. However, it left you a bit vulnerable," Anne explained, while she pulled Marcie over the slippery concoction on the floor. "I could feel your emotions, especially your frustration, which gave me the perfect moment to think some bait your way."

"The...Discourager. It was a ruse?"

"No. Not really. She really did have those with her, and I hoped that she might use them on you, but she's my daughter," Anne said, proudly, giving Marcie a hug. "She took my original concept and made it better."

"Hence, my Insta-Ice, instead," Marcie said. "I'm afraid, we lied to you, or rather, I tricked you, and my mother lied to you. Sorry."

Hadji stared into their smug eyes and hated himself for being duped so thoroughly. "No! Mine...is the stronger...will!" he choked in his defiance. "My discipline is..." By then, the ice had engulfed his face and most of his head, and he was forced into silence.

"Hmm. I guess he couldn't control you, and deal with me at the same time," Marcie figured, as both girls jogged out of the laboratory.

"Good thing, too," Anne agreed, as they headed for the elevator. "Now, we have to get back to that time machine."

Entering the car and depressing the button for the lower levels, Anne gave Marcie a friendly point at her back.

Marcie turned her head to see that, in her fervor to leave the lab, she had forgotten to remove the LabPak that she carried.

Pragmatically, she decided to hold on to it. It could come in handy where they were going. "Oh, before I forget, cool designs on that LabPak," Marcie complimented.

Little Anne's face beamed. "Why, thank you, dear! By the way, did you know that we were also working on a non-lethal that puts people to sleep? True story!"