Disclaimer: I do not own Sky High or its characters, settings etc, all of which belong to Disney. Original characters and concepts belong to me.
A/N: I feel I have to give credit to a genius called IndeMaat who worked out a way around the Document Manager glitch...
Chapter 10: Hypnotic
Warren just looked after her for a few long moments as she went to the bathroom to wash off the blood. As she was wrapping her palm in a bandage he walked over and leant against the doorframe.
"Ethan should probably look at that, you know," he said. He needed to get their resident genius on the case.
"Why?" she asked, not even looking up as she fastened the bandage with a safety pin. "It's not like there's anything seriously wrong with me."
"Apart from the fact that you've suddenly stopped feeling pain."
Layla looked at him sharply and narrowed her eyes. "I think it's you Ethan needs to look at," she replied.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I mean I think you've finally lost it, Warren."
"I've lost it? You were the one practically performing surgery on yourself without anesthetic!"
She was perfectly calm. "I don't know what you thought you saw, but you didn't."
Warren sighed. Okay, maybe he should pretend to cooperate – anything to give Ethan a chance to find out what was going on with her.
"Fine. I'll go see Ethan, but you're coming too."
For a moment she seemed to think that over, and then she agreed.
"Ethan, Warren thinks he's seeing things!" Layla announced to Ethan, Will and Zach almost as soon as they were in earshot. The other two happened to be chatting with Ethan in the corridor outside his office on Level 4a. Fortunately, at this time in the evening, most of the doctors in that section had left for the day.
"Actually, it's Layla who thinks that," corrected Warren. "Me, I know there's something odd going on."
Ethan looked between the two of them uncertainly. "Listen, if you guys are having some sort of issues, I don't actually want to hear about it. I am not your shrink."
"You don't need to be a shrink to see that something's suddenly stopped her from feeling pain," growled Warren.
"How ridiculous is that?" said Layla lightly, pulling a face.
"She cut her hand, and then pulled the bits of glass out and she didn't even flinch."
"Of course I did! It hurt horribly. I don't know what his case is."
Will, Ethan and Zach were extremely confused. They had no idea who to believe.
After a calculating glance at Warren, Layla evidently decided to play her trump card. "Look, given recent history, which one of us is the more mentally stable and reliable source of information?"
Warren shot her a glance. He couldn't really blame them if they sided with her considering he hadn't exactly been too emotionally stable lately.
It was time for more drastic measures. In one swift movement he twisted her arm behind her back and turned her slightly so that they could see what he was doing. Before anyone could react to his apparently unwarranted violent behavior, he unclasped the safety pin from her bandaged hand and gently pushed the point into the back of her neck, just enough to cause pain. The others could clearly see that Layla, busy struggling in Warren's grip and unable to see what he was doing behind her, made absolutely no reaction to the pin prick.
The three guys just stared blankly, and for a moment Warren wondered if they were also affected by the same thing as Layla was. But then Will seemed to recover from his surprise enough to fish a neutralizer out of his pocket and slap it around her wrist.
"Just in case," he said apologetically as she looked at him in dismay, and then he turned to Ethan, "Okay, what's going on here?"
"It's like she's been hypnotized or something!" exclaimed Zach.
"Hypnotized?" repeated Warren doubtfully.
"Yeah, I saw it on TV once. They hypnotized this lady and they could stick needles in her and she wouldn't feel a thing. We just need to get her to snap out of it." He walked over to Layla who was still struggling but Warren wasn't letting her go. Zach tried snapping his fingers, clapping his hands and telling her to 'Wake up when I count to three', while she just regarded him with an expression of amused tolerance.
"Thanks for trying, Zach, but there's nothing wrong with me. Apart from the fact that my husband," and she gave another tug on her captive arm, "has recently gone psycho."
Ethan had been watching all of this in silence. He knew for sure that having her arm twisted like that should be hurting her a lot, but she appeared to be more annoyed about the fact that she was captive than showing any sign of pain.
Warren was right. There was something wrong here.
"Layla," he started gently, "How about we go run some tests and then we can see why you – "
"Why I what?" she cut in defensively. "I'm not the one who needs to be examined; I'm perfectly fine! I can't believe you people are all taking sides against me! This is so sexist, you pigs!"
"So much for being the more stable one," commented Warren.
Ethan could see that he was going to have to try a more subtle approach. "Look at it this way: we do some tests and then we can prove to Warren beyond a doubt that there's nothing wrong with you. How does that sound?"
She took a moment to think about that and then nodded. Warren released her arm and she walked off beside Ethan without even a backwards glance.
Déjà vu, thought Will, standing at the observation window. Only this time it was Layla in the isolation ward, not Warren, although the ex-pyro was in there too by his own choice. She was lying on the bed with a drip, hooked up to an EEG and heart monitor, and her biometrics had been deleted from the neutralizer around her wrist so that she couldn't remove it herself.
For the past hour while her test results were being analyzed, she had been pleading pathetically with Warren to let her out because there was nothing wrong with her. Apparently unmoved by her emotional appeal, he kept trying to draw her into meaningful conversation in the hope that she might say something that would give them a clue what was going on.
When the results were ready, Ethan reported that everything was perfectly normal and there was no sign of any sort of drug or foreign substance in her system. As far as he could see, there wasn't any medical reason for her condition.
Which meant that the floor was open for some of the more bizarre suggestions.
"Well, she's obviously not a shape-shifter or she would have reverted to herself when she was neutralized," Kate was thinking out loud. She and Magenta had joined the others outside the iso room as soon as they heard something was wrong. Layla's mom was also on her way to the hospital.
"Evil twin?" suggested Maj. "Clone?"
"Mind-controlling alien parasite?" put in Zach.
"No, no and no," responded Ethan to their contributions in turn. "If she was a twin or a clone she'd have Layla's DNA but not her fingerprints, so this is definitely the real Layla. And an alien parasite would have shown up on the MRI."
"Could Brainwave have done something to her?" asked Will, grabbing at straws.
"Not unless he's suddenly developed a new power," Ethan answered, "And given that the man is pushing 80, I doubt it."
They all knew that Brainwave's power was the ability to see the weakness in any situation or person. Apart from giving him a lot of insight into how to defeat his enemies, it had nothing to do with affecting anyone mentally.
"Still, there's a good chance it was something that happened during that mission today," said Magenta thoughtfully. "I'll go through the bank's security footage. Maybe someone got to her somehow."
"I'll come too," offered Kate. "That new image enhancing software I just got might help."
The two of them left to work on that as Layla's mother arrived, and Ethan escorted her into the isolation room. As soon as she saw her mom, Layla launched into a pitiful appeal about how her friends thought she was crazy and they wouldn't believe her even though they couldn't find anything medically wrong with her.
"Are you sure she's not herself?" asked her mother anxiously.
Ethan took a sterilized pin from his equipment tray and pricked his patient in the back of her neck. Her reaction was obviously faked as she tried to guess, unsuccessfully, when the jab would be.
"Isn't that a rather barbaric way of finding out?" It seemed Mrs. Williams was trying not to think about the larger issue of what was wrong with her daughter.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Williams," Ethan apologized sadly, "But that's the only way I have to prove it considering we can't trust anything she says."
"What do you mean, you can't trust anything I say?!" Layla was getting hysterical now. "I thought you people were my friends and now you're turning my own family against me! I hate you all!"
Ethan took a syringe and injected a sedative into her drip. When she saw what he was doing, she tried to pull the IV out of her arm, apparently afraid of what he might be drugging her with. Warren, who had been lurking on the fringe of this conversation, stepped forward and caught her hands in time. Her mom backed out of the room, knowing that there was nothing she could do to help.
Warren and Ethan shared a glance as Layla continued to rant and struggle, and the doctor nodded reluctantly. It was for her own good so that she wouldn't hurt herself, they told themselves as they restrained her to the bed with Velcro cuffs. After a few more minutes of complaining, Layla's words started to slur and then finally she passed out.
"Well, there's good news and bad news," announced Magenta as Ethan came out of the iso room.
Will turned from the observation window. "Which do I want to hear first?" he asked with a sigh.
"Well, the good news is, we think we know what happened and who did it," replied Kate, showing him and Ethan two blown-up images from the security camera footage. One showed a woman with her hand on Layla's arm, and the other, which was even further enlarged, was a close-up of the woman's fingers. There was a spike protruding from the ring on her middle finger into Layla's wrist through her glove, evidently administering some sort of injection.
"So what's the bad news?" asked Will looking closely at the images.
"The problem is that there's very little info available on her," explained Maj. "All I can tell you is her name is Hypnotic and she's a transmutator."
"We have no idea what she's done to Layla or how to reverse it," said Kate.
"The NCS private file on her is heavily encoded, so it'll take longer than usual to crack." Magenta turned to Ethan, "Unless you know something?"
"I don't know much about her," he replied, looking at the image, "But I know someone who might."
"Yeah, that's definitely Hypnotic."
Denise Walker, a.k.a. The Alchemistress, barely had to look at the images before giving her opinion to the team assembled at the observation window.
"So I was right," stated Zach, "Layla was hypnotized to not feel pain."
"No pain? I've never heard of her doing that before." She frowned over that for a moment, and then continued, "Anyhow, it's not hypnosis actually; she's just made use of the popular misconception that hypnotizing people is a form of brainwashing. She's a transmutator, but very specialized because the only substance she can create is a powerful mind control compound."
"But there's no sign of any drugs in Layla's blood test," objected Ethan.
"That's because it doesn't travel by the bloodstream; it's a neurotransmitter imposter." They all looked at her blankly (apart from Ethan, of course) so she tried to explain, "It replaces the chemicals in the gaps between nerve cells." They still looked a bit confused, but fortunately they didn't really need to understand the neuropsychology behind it, so she went on with her explanation, "It spreads through the neural network until it reaches the brain in less than a second, at which point Hypnotic gives the person her instructions. Thereafter, any choice they make is weighed up against this programming. You may have noticed that Layla takes a little longer than usual to make a decision."
Will asked, "Won't the drug just wear off?"
"No, it self-replicates at the synapses between the neurons," she replied and paused before delivering the worst part, "And there's no antidote."
"Then make one up!" snapped Warren impatiently. He turned on his heel and strode back into the iso room.
Denise raised an eyebrow at this, but Will almost smiled. He had to admit that snappy Warren was a lot better than the apathetic Warren they'd been seeing for the past few months. At least this was some sort of emotion, even if it was negative. It was good to see him get some of his fire back, no pun intended.
He shook himself out of his reverie to focus on the current issue. "This Hypnotic is really dangerous. I mean, she could walk right into the President's office and just take over!"
"Yeah," agreed Denise, "But fortunately she's not that ambitious. Or at least she's never shown any sign."
Kate asked, "How do you know so much about her?"
"I did my doctorate on transmutation."
That gave Ethan an idea. "Yeah, you're a transmutator too – can't you just create an antidote from something?"
"If I could, I would have already," she answered. "But, unfortunately, my power works only on metals."
At that point they all heard a distinct 'Ow' from the isolation room.
Layla was starting to stir as Warren walked in, and he prepared himself for another round of begging and pleading, and probably a tirade about the fact that she was restrained. It was the least he could do, he supposed, considering how much she'd put up with from him the past 6 months. At least now he had some idea of what was causing her to act like this.
" Warren?" she said in a small confused voice. She flexed her injured hand and winced, and then found she couldn't lift her arms. "What happened? The last I remember we were at the bank facing off with Brainwave…?"
He decided to play along. "You were injected with a mind control drug."
She looked down at the restraints and then up at him with huge eyes. "Did I hurt someone?" she whispered in horror.
This was totally different to her behavior up to this point, and there was obviously a possibility it was another ploy to gain her freedom, but Warren couldn't help hoping that it was genuine. Time for the unfortunately 'barbaric' litmus test. He palmed the pin from the equipment tray and under the pretense of taking her hand, jabbed the point into her palm.
"Ow!"
He smiled slightly. "Welcome back."
She wasn't quite as pleased as he was, understandably. "What was that for?" she demanded, perplexed.
Ethan came into the room, followed by Denise and the others. "I thought you said it wouldn't wear off," he remarked as Layla smiled a bit uncertainly at them all.
"It doesn't normally," replied Denise. "Have you been giving her any other drugs or anything?"
"Just a normal sedative," Ethan answered, showing her the next syringe he had already prepared.
At that point Layla blinked slowly a couple of times as if she was having trouble staying awake, and then she looked around the room, seeming even more confused. She gave Warren and Ethan a scowl, and then raised her eyebrows at Denise.
"When did you get here?" she asked.
"Looks like Mr. Hyde is back," remarked Warren.
It appeared that the sedative only had a temporary effect on Hypnotic's drug, but at least they now had a starting point. It would be rather difficult doing lab tests considering there was no trace of it in her bloodstream for them to work with, but Kate had a brainwave and fetched Layla's glove from the Guardians' headquarters. It hadn't been washed yet, so Ethan was able to find a tiny spot of residue where Hypnotic had injected her, and it was enough of a sample to work with.
After a long 48 hours of experimenting with sedatives and struggling to find the mix that was strong enough to neutralize the mind controlling drug but wouldn't cause any sort of damage to the nervous system, the two geniuses finally came up with an antidote.
By mid-afternoon on Friday, the Guardians plus Denise were sitting around in their headquarters, discussing what the super villainess was up to. Layla was herself again with no memory of the past two days except for the few minutes when the sedative had briefly blocked the effects of the drug. All that lingered was a vague feeling that they were all supposed to go somewhere.
"But if it was something as straightforward as a sedative, surely someone would have come up with an antidote by now?" she asked when they'd finished describing what had happened during the time she'd 'missed'.
"Well, apparently when she's finished with a 'hypnotized' minion, she generally kills them and disposes of the body so that no one can learn anything about her drug from an autopsy," explained Ethan.
Denise added, "Also, she doesn't tend to allow her victims out into public, and when she does, they act so normal that no one has any reason to give them a sedative."
"Which brings us back to the question of why did she let Layla go?" Will said. "What 'mission' did Hypnotic program her to do?"
They all looked at each other, at a loss for any suggestions.
"Don't look at me, I can't remember a thing," said Layla.
"Hypnotic could be trying to break up our group," Kate suggested.
"But the only person Layla was really playing divide-and-conquer with was me," Warren pointed out, "And that was probably because I was a threat to her little secret. After that she was just fighting with everyone without trying to get any of us on her side."
Zach had a sudden dose of inspiration. "The hike tomorrow, dude! She suggested that on the way back from the bank."
"That's it!" Layla agreed excitedly. "That explains my vague feeling about going somewhere. My purpose in her plan was obviously to lead the rest of you to her."
"For what reason?" argued Denise. "This isn't her usual M.O. at all."
Will wasn't too concerned. "We'll only find that out when we get there," he shrugged.
"Wait a minute, man," Zach objected. "You're not actually intending to walk right into her hands, are you?"
Ethan replied, "I don't see why we shouldn't. The antidote will protect us from her powers."
"What, us as well?" Magenta indicated herself, Ethan and Zach.
"I seem to remember Layla wanting all of us to go, so yeah, you guys too," Kate said.
"I can't say I like the idea of you all going in without anyone left to watch your backs," remarked Warren.
"But if we don't all go, Hypnotic will know we've worked out her plan," Will reasoned. "We have to act like we're just going on a hike."
Layla added, "And then we'll need to act like we're under her power, at least until we find out what she's up to."
"Actually, you'll need to act like you're under her power the whole time," Denise pointed out.
Layla was watching the security footage of herself from the bank and the hospital from the past two days to get an idea of how she would need to act when she had to pretend to still be 'hypnotized'. When she got to the part where Warren twisted her arm and pricked her neck with the safety pin, she couldn't help saying 'Ow' out loud.
"Sorry."
She turned around to see him standing just inside the door, looking a bit uncertain.
"Don't be." Stopping the tape, she smiled reassuringly and invited him to sit next to her with a gesture. "You did what you had to do to prove there was something wrong. Imagine if you hadn't."
Imagine if you'd just avoided the problem and retreated into your shell like you've been doing for the past six months, she thought. He sat down next to her and slid his arm around her shoulders. This was the first time he'd initiated that sort of affectionate contact in ages, and in her surprise it took her a few moments to remember what she'd been saying.
"I would be leading everyone straight into her trap," she carried on when she'd managed to gather her thoughts. "We'd have no way to stop her and we wouldn't even know we needed to stop her because we'd be, well, 'hypnotized'."
"Mm, things could've been a little tricky if she had Stronghold under her power."
"Yeah. A lot tricky," Layla replied, snuggling up to him as she started the tape again.
Warren responded by kissing the top of her head, and she smiled, thinking how ironic it was that their relationship was often aided by super villains. It was thanks to Royal Pain that they got to be friends in the first place, thanks to Weatherman that they got together, thanks to Arson that they got engaged … and now it was thanks to Hypnotic that she was getting him back from one of his worst enemies … himself.
