Gen13: Mystics

by Joshua The Evil Guy

Sequel to my stories "Harry Potter and Project Genesis" and "Gen13: Quarters". The Team's been in Sunnydale for a few months now, and the world hasn't ended. Trends like that don't tend to last. Issue 1: Among Friends And Enemies

2. Beach Blanket Brawl

Issue 02: Beach Blanket Brawl

Summary: Two escaped super villains equals double the trouble for Gen13, especially when they come calling on the team's day off! How will they handle the dreaded Helmut, or deal with the deranged Traveller? But the real question that has to be asked, are they ready to join Thundercrack on his next Hit-Wizard Assignment?

Lynch Villa

Sunnydale, CA

June 1999

Images displayed a scene of devastation straight out of a war zone. Too bad it was not one.

"Tonight, firefighters work desperately to control a raging fire that threatens to consume the munitions depot at Ellisberg Air Force Base," the voice from the TV reported, before panning out to show an attractive Asian news anchor in a bright green pencil-skirt suit. "This was the latest in a series of attacks against US Military installations. Each time, the mysterious attacker has broken into a base undetected and made off with sophisticated military hardware."

The image switched to a still-frame-capture from degraded security footage, highlighting a humanoid figure amongst the smoke of the fires, only it was just as clear just by looking at it that the figure was anything but human.

"While local and Federal authorities decline to comment about this latest attack," the news anchor continued while the security footage played, "our sources have obtained video-footage from the surveillance cameras which may shed some light on the identity of the perpetrator." The screen went back to a close-up of her as she signed off, "For the moment, however, the only thing certain is that the attacker is still at large and could very well strike again. This is Colleen Chen, ZNN News, White Sands, New Mexico."

Lynch turned off the news feed and leaned back in his chair, watching the bank of monitors as they continued to display the ongoing situation in New Mexico.

"So, Helmut is back in business," he said, steepling his fingers as he considered the issue. "And it looks like he's making up for lost time. I warned them twenty-five years ago that a maximum security prison wasn't going to be enough to hold him."

"You actually know this criminal, sir?" Anna asked from directly behind his chair.

"I was the man who put him away after his first crime spree, Anna," he replied. "Before Team 7, I was just a young adventurer out to make a reputation. In the process, I nearly got myself killed while bringing Helmut to justice. At his trial, Helmut swore he'd get even with me."

Showing concern, Anna then asked, "Will he still come after you, sir? Do you think the children are in any danger?"

Turning around, he regarded her with steely eyes. "If I've learned nothing else from all my years with I.O., it's to always expect the unexpected."

While Lynch and Anna were watching the news, elsewhere in the beach-side multistory mansion another crisis was being monitored. On the top floor, the western bedroom specifically, the resident ICW Hit-Wizard, Harry Potter was in communication with his American counterparts, in regards to a memo that had gone out to all American-based Hit-Wizards as a matter of procedure.

"How did this happen?" Harry demanded of the face in the mirror.

While normally this might be a sign of delusion or confusion, in this case the face was not his own, and it was a magic communication mirror. It also happened to be 'disguised' as a standard laptop with video-conference capability, but in truth it was only a magic mirror with a fancy stand.

"Sir, I can assure you..." the American wizard placated him.

"Spare me your platitudes," he interrupted. "I mean, specifically, tell me step-by-step how this happened? I don't care about fault or blame. I want to know what she did to get out so I can neutralize it when I capture her again."

"... Again, sir?" the wizard started looking down at his notes.

"How?" Harry stressed the word as much as he could.

"Well, as near as we have been able to determine, she either got her hands on one of the guards' emergency portkeys, or had some outside help that disrupted the wards enough for her to disapparate. All that can really be said, at this stage of the investigation, is that she was left in her cell, and an hour later when the standard roving patrol went by the same cell... she was gone."

Harry sat back and considered the facts. "Was she permitted, by anyone, access to any of her original possessions? The armor, or any piece of it?" he asked.

"No sir," the bureaucrat replied, checking his notes. "All of it was confiscated and sent to the Magical Intelligence Administration. As was she, for a month, before it was determined that they'd gotten everything they could out of her and put her into the Justice System for rehabilitation. According to her records, she was quite unstable. Kept insisting that she could not be held by, let me see here; 'a bunch of fossils'. Might I inquire, sir, what your interest is in this particular criminal?"

"I'll tell you about it after I find her and turn her back in," Harry said, "For right now, put it on the record that I'm taking this case. Send me as much intel as you can. I'll check back in once I have her in custody." He then cut the connection before anything more could be said.

"So," a feminine voice startled the wizard where he sat at his desk, "you're heading out again, huh?"

"Kat!" Harry exclaimed, getting his heart rate back under control. "You startled me!"

"Sorry," she apologized and walked into his room.

It wasn't until she did so that he took notice of her current attire. She must've just come from exercising, because she was wearing nothing but a green and purple sports bra (which on Fairchild was more akin to a push-up bra that was one size too small), and green spandex shorts with purple piping (which sat low on her hips and stopped with the bottom of her waist, even as it conformed to every curve of her body), showcasing a great deal of sweat-soaked, tanned, and well-toned skin. And yet again, Harry was reminded unabashedly that he was still a man and here was this divine epitome of femininity, and he was going to have to pretend everything was normal and they were just friends and... He hated his life so much.

"What is going on, Harry?" she asked, stopping next to his desk and looking down at him, and thereby forcing him to look 'up' at her. He quickly turned back to face the communication mirror, wishing that it was a real laptop for once.

"It's nothing to worry about," he said. "For right now at least. How go the studies? And by that I mean—"

"Our mystic skills and how well we're learning to use them," Caitlin interrupted him. "Fine, I guess. My time with that doctor friend of Mistress Harkness really helped me to understand my magic. I know probably as many spells as you do, but I can still only use Defensive Magic."

"But you can use it?" he confirmed.

She nodded and sat on the edge of his desk, still trying to catch him so he'd look her way, but he kept finding legitimate excuses not to look anywhere in her general direction. Seeing that he didn't notice her silent acknowledgment of the question, she said aloud, "Yes. Well enough to defend myself and increase the effectiveness of what we mistakenly believed was my invulnerability. I can block or negate almost any offensive magic sent my way. More than that for anything of the natural world, and a lot of what our enemies are going to throw my way."

"What about the others?" Harry asked, getting up from his chair and moving about the room, straightening up things or otherwise just keeping himself occupied and avoid looking at her for too long.

"I can't get Roxy or Grunge to take anything seriously, so I have no clue what they can or can't do with their magic," she freely admitted, also standing, but refusing to chase him down. "But we both saw them use their mystic talents recently and they seem to have good control over it. As for Bobby and Sarah," the buxom redhead shrugged, making Harry really regret how clean he kept his windows that he caught her reflection at that precise moment, "He's getting stronger, but his Gen-Factor is still much stronger. Still can't fly or melt bullets with his eyes, but he can start, stop, and control any fires in his vicinity, as well as create a number of different magic flames that have different effects beyond just burning everything they touch. Sarah is keeping her studies private, but she's practiced a few spells with me so I know she's powerful and is growing the same as the rest of us."

Harry suddenly stiffened and turned on the spot to stare at his teammate. She frowned when she noted that his eyes were laser-locked onto hers and his own expression spoke of fear and concern in abundance.

"What spells, specifically, did you try?" he demanded to know. "What classification? Name? Effect? Purpose? Kat, you cannot just mess around with—!"

"We know, Harry," she interrupted him once more. "Sarah wanted to try out her elemental spells, maybe try and combine them with her own Gen-Factor. She summoned wind, rain, and called a storm. She could call forth a lightning strike, but couldn't dictate where it would strike, hence my participation so we didn't destroy the neighborhood. We also tried putting a protection spell on the household. And... given my own talents, I asked her if I could help out, at the very least to learn the spell."

The wizard frowned and furrowed his brow in concentration.

"Protection spell?" he said. "I already have every ward in the book, and quite a few that aren't, on this place. What kind of protection spell?"

The green-eyed redhead smirked and turned to leave his room, saying over her shoulder something that had him racing for yet another cold shower. "The kind that require the participants be sky-clad."

"..." Harry's mouth hung open as the door to his room swung closed, leaving him standing there, agape.

Beach Skate Park

Laguna Beach, CA

Next Day

It was a hot, bight, sunny day. Barely a cloud in the sky, and the temperature in the mid-eighties with low humidity. In other words, it was a typical Southern Californian afternoon, one that had all the teens and those not having to work spend all their time doing everything outdoors.

It also happened to be a Tuesday. (For the record)

His name is Percival Edmund Chang, but nobody calls him that. In grade school everyone just called him Eddy. He now prefers the name Grunge, symbolic of his lifestyle. In so many more ways than one.

A life that has—relatively—recently gone through some major changes. More than just his involvement with a bunch of other kids in the government experiment called Project Genesis, he was also discovered to have innate mystical talents, singling him out as a Kekkaishi, a magic user that specializes in creating and controlling magic barriers. Thanks to John Lynch, Grunge, Freefall, Fairchild, Rainmaker, Burnout and Thundercrack were spared the fate of being mindless cogs in I.O.'s war machine. Thanks to Harry Potter, they all were now aware of and were growing in the use of their mystic talents.

On a beautiful summer morning, however, the only thing on Grunge's mind is hanging out with his pal at a local mini-ramp in Laguna Beach.

"Hey, Bobby!" Grunge called out as he set up for and pulled off his trick, "How rad is this invert? It just doesn't get any smoother."

Coming up the ramp and gearing up for his own trick, Robert Lane, better known as Burnout, replied with a bit of trash talk. "Ooooh, an invert. You can do those, too? You better start rollerblading." he mocked.

"Oho!" Grunge called back with a hard laugh. "Sarcastic words from the quiet man, eh? There's nothing wrong with 'old school' moves."

Driving up to the top, Bobby took to the air and replied with both words and action. "Check me out—" he executed a near-flawless skateboard trick, "—kick-flip to fakie, chump!"

More quietly, the blond added as an aside, "And I didn't have to use my Gen-Factor to catch it clean!"

"Hey! I—I was legit!" Grunge protested.

"Whatever you say, bro!" Bobby laughed.

They continued showing off and trying to one-up and trash talk each other while a group of other skaters and onlookers observed and provided live commentary. After a while though, the sun started to set and most everybody had things to do, like eat dinner, and most of the commentary wandered off. The last of them waved goodbye to the two GenActives with a hearty, "Great session, guys!"

"Our pleasure!" Grunge called back, holding out his hand in salute as he kicked up his board and caught it. "Looks like we got our own groupies," he said in an aside to Bobby.

"Think so?" the blond shrugged. "I wish it was this easy getting Sarah's attention."

"Still no luck, huh?"

They both turned and started walking back towards home. Or rather, towards the van so they could drive back to Sunnydale.

"Every time I try to get close, she shuts me down." Bobby said.

"I get the same vibes from Kat," Grunge agreed, drawing an incredulous look from his friend.

"I don't think melding yourself into her bed exactly helped the situation, Grunge," he shared.

"It would've worked, man!" the shorter man defended himself. "But I still can't figure out how Anna knew it was me when she was changing the sheets!"

Shaking his head, and determining that a change in conversation was necessary, Bobby said, "I just wish she and Mr. Lynch would both get off my crank. They're always complaining about my jamming, but if I didn't have my guitar, I'd go nuts living in that house!"

"You gots to chill, Bobby!" Grunge grinned. "I mean, we're all still getting used to each other. But, hey, we've got the sun, the waves, our boards, and some Skate Bettys. Just don't rock the boat and we're in for some smooth sailing. Know what I mean?"

Lynch Villa

It was the team's "day off", something that Lynch had promised them, and which they'd all insisted upon for every week since taking him up on his offer of hiding out with his protection and training.

The girls were out by the pool, while the boys were off skating. It had been just Caitlin and Sarah, both having a quiet competition to see who could do the most laps, so when the Native American noticed Roxy walking out in a flower print bikini with a towel casually draped around her neck, she asked, "Joining us for some laps, Roxy?"

"Actually, I'm looking for Grunge," she replied, cocking her hips as she looked about frustrated. "If this suit doesn't get his attention, nothing will."

"Hate to break the news, but he and Bobby went skateboarding down in Laguna," the brown-skinned beauty said as she pulled herself out of the water, stretching out her dark red one-piece suit back into place as she got to her feet.

She padded over and grabbed her own towel before patting herself dry and giving her long raven black hair a quick squeeze. Leaving the rest to air dry, she joined Roxy by the lounge chairs and laid herself back to enjoy the warm sun and the cool breeze. Opening her eyes, she noticed the scantily-clad teen next to her having some difficulty with putting suntan lotion on her back.

"You want some help with that?" she offered.

"If you could just do my back, that'd be great," Roxy said, already moving into position so she was laying down for maximum exposure.

"Still no luck with Grunge, huh?" asked Sarah as she moved over and took the lotion bottle.

"Damn straight," Roxy scowled, kicking her legs up behind her as she rested her chin on crossed arms. "And you know why, don'tcha?"

Dripping the suntan lotion into her hands and holding it for a bit before laying her hands on the white girl's bare back, just to warm it up some, Sarah shrugged and answered, "Well, it seems—"

Only for Roxy to interrupt with a whining grumble. "It's all Kat's fault!"

"Caitlin?" Sarah startled slightly. "How's that?"

"Just look at her, Sarah," the younger woman pouted. "How am I supposed to compete against that?"

As they were speaking, fortunately just outside of hearing range, the flawless redhead climbed out of the pool up via the deep-end ladder, allowing the water to flow and trickle down off of her at each step so that there wouldn't be that much of a puddle when she stepped fully onto the deck. It had the purely unintentional effect of displaying every single one of the perfect woman's lethal curves and sculpted muscles.

"I mean, we all received super powers from the Gen-Factor," Roxy said. "But Kat got some kind of bonus and ended up this Ultra-Babe! It just sucks! And what makes it even worse is the fact that she doesn't seem to realize it. If she copped an attitude, at least I'd have a reason to hate her guts. But Kat's always been like a sister to me."

"Appearances aren't everything, Roxy," Sarah admonished her younger teammate as she continued applying the lotion to her upper back.

"Shyeah, right," Roxy scoffed. "Been hitting that Peace Pipe pretty hard lately, huh?"

Rolling her eyes, and only refusing to rise to the bait because she knew that her friend didn't really mean anything by it, she just sighed and refilled her hands with a fresh supply of lotion as she moved onto her lower back. "OK, OK, end of lecture," she said. "But just between you and me, I can actually understand Grunge's... 'desires', primitive as they may be. But it's an altogether different matter whether Grunge can satisfy Caitlin's needs," her own hands happened to roam a bit further south during her musing, cupping the young woman's tight ass as she rubbed in the lotion, "in a way only another woman truly can," then she leaned over and whispered right into the bi-color-haired girl's ear, intentionally brushing her nylon-clad breasts against her bare back, "if you know what I mean."

Roxy's eyes widened and her whole body suddenly tensed with a fight-or-flight reaction, which almost instantly stalled as a certain... encounter that she'd had during her time at a certain cottage in Canada rang very loudly through her mind.

"Uh... oh." Roxy gulped and was suddenly hyper-aware of Sarah's hands on her body, and was surprised at her own reaction to that awareness, as the tingling of every hair on her body going rigid coupled with the pooling heat of a full-body blush flooded throughout her limbs, and especially her buttocks, where the Native American lesbian's hands still rested, teasingly squeezing and rubbing in the tanning lotion. "I... I never would've, um, guessed... I guess."

Struggling to hid her blush, she hunkered down into her arms, suddenly wishing that she and that Jennifer character had never gotten into that fight. If she hadn't, then maybe Tris wouldn't have... The whole thing was just such a mess that she felt it had scarred her for life. At the very least, it kept her from snapping out like a typical homophobe. Unfortunately, it also left her at a complete loss and questioning her own... reactions when caught in a situation like, well, like this!

Sarah moved on and finished up her friend's legs, completely unaware of the confusing reactions she was dealing with. Besides, Roxy wasn't exactly her type and she'd caught no sense that the bi-hair-colored girl was even bi-curious, let alone even casually interested in the same sex.

Roxy blamed Tris and her weird 'family' for her current situation. Here she was, a completely straight—if not entirely normal—girl trying to impress the boy she liked so he'd like her more and actually pay attention to her... and she was letting herself get felt up by the only lesbian in residence and... she wasn't hating it. She groaned, willfully believing it was in frustration over her feelings rather than what Sarah's hands were doing to her legs and feet. Magic had ruined her life!

Finished, the Native American beauty stood up and stepped back over to her own lounge chair and sought to relax once more. Only to be brought out of her reverie by a quiet and soft, "Thanks Sarah."

Smiling, she replied easily, "No problem Roxy."

Suddenly the younger GenActive sat up, glaring at her teammate. "Hold the phone," she said, keeping her voice quiet enough they wouldn't immediately be overheard. "Are you saying that you think you could give it to Kat better than Grunge could? Hot as Kat is, enough for even me to admit that, she doesn't strike me as the kind that would swing both ways, if you know what I mean. Sides, it is kind of obvious that she's got a bit of a crush on You-Know-Who, right?"

Sarah just shrugged and gave a small smile. "I never said that I was planning on doing anything. I merely suggested that another woman would be able to satisfy her more than Grunge could. I know you like him and everything, Roxy, but he is rather disgusting."

Feeling the sudden need to defend her man, Roxy couldn't stop herself from shouting out loud, "He is not DISGUSTING!"

Appearing as though waiting for just that moment, although really he'd been on the patio trying not to get caught staring at his bikini-clad housemates, Grunge pulled out the piece that had been bothering him for the past few minutes before holding it up in front of Roxy's face while saying, "Hey, Rox, you want disgusting? Check out this whoppin' booger!"

"Eeep!"

The gravity-control diviner squeaked in surprise before reacting with a completely reasonable response. She used her powers to throw her disgusting perverted boyfriend into the pool.

"WHOAAA!" Grunge cried out as he floated/flew into the air and then paused right over the deep end of the pool. "Watcha doin' Rox?!"

*KERPLASH*

"Don't ever sneak up on me like that again, Grunge!" Roxy screamed down at him as his head resurfaced, clutching her towel to her chest. "Or the next time I swear I'll dump you in the middle of the ocean!"

"Glub-glub-glub!" Grunge tried to protest, but his mouth hadn't quite breached the surface yet. "Geez! What's gotten into her?!" he asked, but everyone had already walked away.

Sunnydale Beach

Harry was running.

Not all out, which would defeat the purpose of running along the beach anyway. No, he was just running the same as every one else that goes jogging along the edge of the ocean. To keep fit and to think.

Sure, his Gen-Factor powers enabled him to control how time passed around him, as well as to affect the passage of time for those he was in physical contact with. Just because he could be faster than everyone around him did not mean that he was 'fast'. Not to mention that when his powers had first manifested, he'd had to take regular breaks and he'd eaten practically a ton of food. Like, literally, nearly one thousand kilograms of food!

Since then, he'd made sure that he could run a minimum of a full kilometer without rest or breaks. Unenhanced of course. Of course, since starting his regimen, he'd been steadily increasing the distance and now averaged five to ten kilometers a day. The important part was that he could run the distance uninterrupted, not how fast it took him to cover it.

Besides, now that he lived in a beach side villa in Southern California, rather than a suburban model home, with relatives that hated him, in Southern England, or a thousand-year-old castle in Northern Scotland, he found that he actually enjoyed keeping fit and going for long runs. Especially in weather like today; not a cloud in the sky, pleasantly warm without being humid, and friendly neighbors that also liked to jog.

Now if only he was in the mood to actually appreciate the atmosphere.

The Traveller, as she'd been dubbed, had escaped. If she'd been in county lock-up, or even a high-security prison, he'd believed that she'd just managed to repair her damaged suit and time-traveled her way out of there. But she'd been put into a magic prison. Not the Super-Max Prisons of Sub-Alcatraz or Azkaban, but one secure enough that Harry doubted even he could get out of it, not without some inside and outside help that is. Which naturally begged the question, did Nadia have some help of her own? And if so, who?

He'd gotten the file with all the details that the Department of Magic had on one Nadia Breslov, the name they'd had to pry out of her with a combination of spellwork and Veritaserum, as she'd refused to identify herself to any of her 'fossil' captors. At first she'd been labeled crazed or insane or just plain delusional, until the MIA, Magical Intelligence Administration, (the American version of the Department of Mysteries), discovered a few pointed facts about the woman's own biology coupled with the results of tests done on her armor and weapons.

She was from the future. Roughly five to seven hundred years, give or take a few decades here and there, by their calculations. Rather daunting, Harry mused, to think that all magic-users would be extinct within the next half-millennium.

The real problem was that her method of time travel separated her from the time stream, so any changes done to the past or to affect her own future would have no effect on her in the 'present', even if she killed her own ancestor, she would still be here and nothing about her could be changed. Which wouldn't have meant much, if she wasn't a raging psychopath. They did the psychological evaluations and testing. She's a psychopath. Though, admittedly, there were some indications that she'd actually been engineered to be that way, perhaps as some kind of soldier, or evolutionary upbringing. Whatever it was, it was dangerous just to let her 'go back to the future', even if that future no longer existed as such.

So, somebody in the Department of Magic had gotten it in their heads to try and rehabilitate the woman. At the very least subdue her psychopathic tendencies. The MIA had managed to uncover exactly which sub-cranial implant had been pushing those psychopath-signals throughout her brain and reversed it, along with a handful of other trinkets and doodads they'd disabled or altered. Then they'd wrapped things up with a geas to keep her from intentionally killing anybody or anything ever again, before locking her up in a secure facility and letting the system do its work.

Then she escaped. Somehow.

Wizards, Magicians, Mystics, even a Sorcerer or two, all of them a lot smarter and wiser than he was were baffled by the future-woman's escape. Quite a few were as perturbed as he was, and were researching ways to prevent future escape attempts. Harry's job, thankfully, wasn't to keep her in prison, just to catch her and put her back there. Fortunately, he had a plan or two percolating in the back of his mind on how to accomplish just that.

One involved finding out exactly who this 'Langston' character was she'd been going on about when they'd first encountered her. Unfortunately, all evidence pointed to him being a time traveler, same as her, which made 'asking around' more than a bit difficult. And he wasn't exactly keen on causing some kind of historical event, destructive or otherwise, that might get such a time traveler's attention in the first place.

So, until he had more on this Langston, he'd go with one of his alternative plans. Which meant figuring out at least three key pieces of information; how she escaped, where she's been, and what she's truly after. Anything else could be deduced just from answers to one of those questions. Problem was, as a wizard he had no means of getting those answers. The real problem, however, and the reason for him running to 'clear his head' as so many others do, was that he actually had the means of getting those answers... by asking his Team to help him out. He just had no clue as to whether or not they were ready to deal with mystical threats on this level or not. That was the real problem.

Reaching the end of the beach, where the cliffs and mountains took up more space than the flat areas, meaning he was only a mile or two from the city limits, Harry sighed, shook his head as he rested for a beat, before turning and running back to the villa at the same steady pace he'd maintained for the past—glancing at his watch, he was momentarily stunned—two hours!

Huh. Apparently he'd had more on his mind than he'd thought, as his runs usually didn't last more than three-quarters of an hour these days. Double checking his watch, but for the pedometer setting, he was intrigued to note that he'd actually covered... twenty-seven and a half kilometers!? Nearly to twenty-eight kilometers judging from the decimal points... That was fourteen kilometers per hour, or four meters per second... without his Gen-Factor boosting his speed.

He doubted that he'd be winning any races from this alone, but it still kind of surprised him that he could maintain that kind of pace for any length of time without cheating. Maybe he should take Lynch up on his offer to properly gauge his speed and compare it with other speedsters. See how he ranked.

Putting that out of his mind for the time being, Harry started running for real, pushing himself (without tapping into his powers) to his top land speed and making for his home as fast as he could. It was time to have a serious chat with the rest of the Team.

Lynch Villa

"Caitlin?" Lynch said as he walked up to the sunbathing redhead. "May I have a word with you?"

"Huh?" Caitlin pushed her sunglasses up her head as she looked up at the older man, completely unconcerned about him observing her as she lay there in a simple white bikini.

"Sure, Mr. Lynch. What's up?" she asked, raising her head.

"I don't want to alarm you, but I thought you and the others should know—" he started to explain, but she cut him off rather abruptly.

"About Helmut?" she interrupted. "The guy who broke out of prison and has been robbing all those munitions depots. You're worried that he may come after you."

His face a rictus of unpleasant surprise, he blurted out, "How did you know?"

Shrugging, she shifted her green eyes toward the side as she answered, "I saw the news reports about him last night," she reached out for the iced tea on the table beside her, "and then I remembered the photograph of him in your office. Do you think he'll be able to find—huh?" She stopped and looked closer at her glass, which was shaking a lot more than if she'd just bumped the table or anything. "My glass! It's shaking!"

Suddenly, the vibrations only detectable by the iced tea became more pronounced and noticeable enough that the whole household was feeling it now. Those standing almost lost their footing and they could all hear the sound of groaning and moving earth.

"Is it an earthquake?" Sarah shouted. Not being from an area that frequented many tremors, she had no basis to compare it to.

Lynch, on the other hand, had been in his fair share. "No! It must be—!"

"Look!" Caitlin interrupted him again. "Down on the beach! There's something moving under the—!"

Her observation became moot as the object creating a noticeable bulge and trail beneath the granular soil decided to stop hiding and shot out of the ground like a bullet from a cannon.

"HOLEE—!" Grunge screamed out.

"SHITTAH!(*)" Roxy finished for him at the same volume.

(*AN: Definistion of "shittah" - Source of a wood mentioned frequently in the Bible; probably a species of genus Acacia. Source ref: Word Find dot Com ( word/shittah/) )

Helmut was an eight-foot plus armored behemoth that had more in common with an armadillo or mole than a man. Other than the silver metallic armor elements, his uniform was mostly green with rather significant red spots here and there. He also had a tail.

"Come out and face me, Lynch!" the armored mercenary growled in a voice as gravelly as the ground he dug through. "It's payback time for all those miserable years I spent in prison! All because of you! And since you don't have your friend Parvarotti to save you this time, my victory is assured!"

The moment Helmut had revealed himself, Gen13 had instantly sprung into action, so the green-clad villain hadn't even stepped off the beach by the time they stepped forth to challenge him. Fortunately, by staying up on the retaining wall between their backyard and the actual beach, they maintained the high ground, which the ranged members of the team took full advantage of.

"You'll still have to get past us, monster!" Rainmaker yelled as she charged up a bolt of lightning with her Gen-Factor powers.

"Uh... so... what're we supposed to do now?" Bobby whispered as he came up beside the red-swimsuit-clad Native American.

"We take the fight to him, Bobby!" she growled at him as she unleashed the charged up energy with an air-crackling zap.

Rolling his eyes, Bobby groaned, "How'd I know you were going to say that?"

The bolt of Gen-Factor-made lightning struck the armored villain, who started laughing to the team's mounting dismay. "Hehehe! That tickles, baby! I've had worse from static cling."

"I—I just don't have enough power without my power bands..." she cried.

"No sweat, Sarah!" the blond pyromancer next to her said, igniting his own Gen-Factor powers. "I've got the situation under control! Let's see him laugh off one of my plasma blasts!" The stream of open flame shot across the distance with a fiery whroosh, hitting the target right in his face.

"RRAARR!" the monstrous villain cried out in pain. "Now you're making me angry, kid!"

Roxy took one look at the situation and summed it up, "Burnout's blast can't penetrate the armor! But I know just the way to stop him!" She stepped up to the edge of the retaining wall.

"Uh, Rox? Come back here!" Grunge called out to his girlfriend. As much as he wanted to play the field, he still cared about the younger babe. "What the hell do you think you're doing?!" He called out when she jumped down to the beach and practically ran right up to the flame and lightning proof villain.

"Let's see what happens when I use some heavy gravity on Mr. Roly-Poly here!" the bikini-clad Freefall smirked as her hands lit up with sky-blue energy.

"Unnh?!" Helmut suddenly grunted as he felt the effects of the girl's powers. "What's... going on? Can't... Stand... UP!" He crashed back into the sand with a giant whoomph!

"Look Grunge!" she called out with a wide smile. "It worked!"

The others joined her down on the beach as it was clear that Helmut was clearly struggling and couldn't get any purchase to even begin to fight Roxy's gravity powers. Turning as much of his gaze as he could to glare at the one holding him down, he growled in as threatening a tone as he could, "But for how long, little girl? You can't keep me down forever!"

Sarah reached out to encourage her teammate, at least that was her intention when she touched Roxy's arms in a sort of sideways hug. "Don't listen to him, Roxy! Just believe in your—"

"Yeep!" the bi-color-haired girl squeaked as her magic suddenly flared and she lost concentration on what was happening around her. Being a Diviner didn't make one a Seer or vice versa, but a consequence of being able to magically convey information sometimes meant that Roxy could just know things at a glance... or a touch. Things like Sarah's own process of self-discovery and... coming out. Her mind couldn't help but notice a number of similarities between herself and what she'd just divined about her 'lesbian' teammate.

Helmut took full advantage of the Gen Active's lapse and surged to his feet, the movement knocking the two young women nearest him to the sand as he loomed over them.

"You made me lose my concentration!" Roxy accused Sarah beside her.

"C'mon!" Rainmaker tried pulling her teammate to her feet. "We've got to get out of here!"

"Too late, girlie," Helmut growled, "I'm up and the two of you are dead!"

"If they die, it'll be from laughing at that costume of yours, Helmut!" a new voice called for his attention.

"Who?!" he spun on the spot and stopped for a second at the sheer audacity of the speaker. "What is this? A Sports Illustrated Swimsuit photo shoot? I have to admit I'm impressed with what I see," he leered at the gorgeous white-bikini-clad redhead standing before him. "But you're a fool if you think a hot bod's gonna keep me from tearing you apart."

"Let's go, Roxanne!" Sarah hissed as she finally managed to put Roxy to her feet, utilizing Caitlin's distraction while they could.

"The only fool I see around here is you, Helmut," Caitlin mocked as she approached. "It's hard to believe you'd be stupid enough to go after the one man who locked you up in the first place. But then again, I don't suppose someone who runs around dressed like an over-grown armadillo is going to be mistaken for a rocket scientist."

As his anger grew, the observers couldn't help but notice the same vibration that had first heralded Helmut's arrival was even now emitting from his same position.

"YOU!" He was so angry that he could barely speak in complete sentences. As he lost the last of his cool, he charged straight for the supernaturally-endowed superheroine. "You dare to mock me?! I'm going to relish watching Lynch weep over your lifeless corpse!"

It was upon this scene that Harry "Thundercrack" Potter arrived, just in the nick of time. As always.

He grabbed Caitlin by the shoulder and accelerated her into his time stream, and immediately started to berate her. "Please tell me that you all aren't this bloody stupid!" he yelled, his British accent on full, telling her just how pissed he was.

The scantily-clad redhead blinked and reared back upon seeing Helmut 'frozen' right in front of her, his claws in the process of ripping through the palm tree beside her. Fortunately Harry kept his grip on her and they both backed away from the charging monster.

"Harry!" Caitlin hugged her teammate and leader. "When did you get here? And... what do you mean?"

Harry sighed and shook his head as he transferred his hand from her shoulder to her forearm and 'dragged' her around to the other side of the monster's mad rush. He didn't bother noticing the blush shining through the girl's tan as he hadn't let go of her while moving his hand. His next words to her, though, thoroughly extinguished any remaining blush.

"I didn't need to be here from the start to recognize who that is Kat!" Harry snapped at her. "My question is just how thick you all are, because from what little of it I did see, it's pretty damn bloody thick!"

His grip was by no means enough to hurt her, but she could tell, nevertheless, that he was gripping her arm extremely tight. Coupled with his tone and the burning anger she saw in his green eyes made her want to cover up and hide in a corner with her blanket wrapped tight around her, using up an entire box of tissues from sniffling and crying. It wasn't that he was angry with her, it was his disappointment that hurt the most.

"You lot have magic, Caitlin!" Harry screamed at her suddenly cringing form. "Helmut's armor is enough to let him dig through the Earth's crust like a normal person swims through water! Which means that it can withstand extreme pressure, extreme heat, static discharge, and rapidly changing conditions. That is quite literally, every single one of our Gen-Factor abilities and then some! You told me you and Sarah had worked on combining her Gen-Factor with her elemental spells. Bobby could ignite a fire inside the bleedin' armor! And while Roxy had him on the ground earlier, Grunge could have put him in a KEKKAI! Which you then could have reinforced and made strong enough to actually hold him! And do not even get me started about how you basically just walked right up to the super-strong monster with lethal claws and taunted him to his face! And then just STOOD THERE!"

Harry took a deep breath and struggled to get his temper back under control.

"I'm tempted to just put you back in the path of his claws just to teach you, but it wouldn't hurt long enough to stick, I'm afraid," he grumbled, running his other hand through his hair. "I'm going to stay out of this. Unless you lot screw it up all over again. Try and do better, yeah?" Then he let go of her arm and the world started moving again, while Harry disappeared.

Meanwhile, Helmut finished what he'd been in the middle of saying as though no time had passed. Oh wait, it hadn't. Seeing the devastation he wrought to the spot she'd been standing in, she recognized how lucky she'd been that Harry had come along when he did.

"Assuming he can find enough of the pieces after... after... huh?" It had taken a second, but the armored villain finally recognized that his target had not been hit, and was in fact standing behind him. The tree he'd slashed, though, that was still falling.

"TIMBERRR!" Grunge called out as he dove away from the falling tree. Or at least, he tried to. "Uhm... ow," he groaned as the not-as-heavy-as-you'd-think tree landed squarely on his back, driving him into the sand, and driving something else out of him.

Rainmaker and Freefall raced over to help out their teammate while Fairchild positioned herself between the threat and her friends.

"Next time, Mr. Lumberjack," Rainmaker said to Grunge as the girls helped lift while the groaning Gen Active struggled, "try jumping out of the way!" Her face scrunched up and she asked, "Pheeuw! What's that smell?!"

"Grunge," Freefall answered, recognizing the stench all too well.

"Hey," the pinned-kekkaishi protested, "it knocked the wind out of me!"

"Literally!" the Diviner snapped at her boyfriend. "Ate the leftover chili for breakfast, didn't you?!"

"Just keep Burnout away or we could have a real disaster," he joked.

"Hey guys," Fairchild interrupted. "I'm going to borrow this for a second." She then casually and easily picked up the broken tree they'd been struggling with in one hand and swung it about like a baton.

"You've taken your best shot, Helmut," she smirked, hefting the large 'club' in her hands. "Now it is my turn! [HARDEN]" The word she'd spoken wasn't English, or any recognizable language as a matter of fact, but the meaning of the word came through loud and clear. Especially when the wood in her hands seemed to petrify and strengthen before their very eyes.

Fairchild had been studying after all.

"What's that gonna do?" Helmut laughed. "In case you didn't just see, I just tore through that thing like tissue paper, and no matter how hard you can swing it, I'll just do the same thing all over again! Hah!"

"Let's test that theory," Fairchild grinned, pulling back to strike the charging villain as hard as she could, "shall we?" The magically-hardened palm tree hit the armored monster broadside, though he did catch it with his claws.

Claws which then chipped and slipped.

Helmut went skipping and hurtling down the beach toward the ocean.

"Grunge," Fairchild ordered, dropping the broken tree, "Put a barrier around us! Don't let Helmut escape, not even through the ground!"

"On it!" the kekkaishi snapped to attention and then assumed his stance, quickly establishing a nigh-invisible red energy cube around them, which went underground as well as out into the water, keeping Helmut inside. What was more impressive was that it was clear air, the water, and pretty much everything that wasn't Helmut specifically, could pass through the barrier. Yet, when Helmut tried to get past it, he was shocked and sent shooting back to where he'd started from.

"Ooooh," the monster growled at the approaching redhead. "Think you've got me cornered? You've got me shaking in my boots, baby! So I guess I'd better hurry up and kill you while I've still got the chan—hunh?!"

"Been there and done that, Jerky!" He'd taken another swipe at her, but rather than rely on Harry's speed, Fairchild relied upon her own reflexes and strengths, jumping over the whooshing swipe, and then turning it into a sweeping flip that put her into Helmut's blind spot, effectively disappearing to his eyes.

"You're looking a little tense there, Helmut! Take a load off your feet..." Sliding beneath him, Fairchild positioned and braced herself to knock the behemoth off his feet one last time.

"Son of a—HMMPH!"

"...and get some sun!" Fairchild swung her legs up perpendicular to the rest of her body at high speed, quite effectively flipping the armored villain end over end. "Listen up, Team! We've got to keep him down!" she ordered as she kipped back up on her feet.

"Damn you! I'll—!" he cursed, struggling much like a turtle on its back.

"A little hot under the collar, Helmut?" Rainmaker commented as she called forth a huge wave down upon the prone figure. "Let's see if I can cool you off a bit. Surf's up!"

"D'OH!"

"Wipeout!" Fairchild grinned as she high-fived Rainmaker. "Nice work, Sarah. All that sea water's created a pool of quicksand around him! Now... how about we mix things up a bit? Remember that whirlpool spell you tried on the hot tub the other day?"

Rainmaker matched her teammate's grin and then knelt just outside of the churning earth and the struggling beast within. A handful of whispered incantations later, she drew a sigil into the sand and after the spell was complete, clapped her hands three times. In response to the final clap, the sigil glowed briefly before vanishing from the sand, and the quicksand holding Helmut was suddenly a lot more active, looking more like the ocean in a hurricane than your typical pool of quicksand.

"Whugh-da...*glub*?" he gargled, unable to get any purchase and barely able to stay above the surface.

"Spell won't last long," Rainmaker warned, still kneeling at the edge of the quicksand area. "Looks as though we've got him trapped for now."

Up on the wall, Lynch came up behind Burnout with an urgent task. "Bobby, I need you to set up your electric guitar," he said, taking the blond by the shoulder.

"Huh?" he replied, perplexed. "Set up my rig? Here? Now?"

"We don't have much time," Lynch ordered.

"Fortunately," Harry said from right in front of them, Bobby's guitar in hand, "time is something of my specialty. Let me guess, sensitive to certain vibrations on a specific frequency?"

Lynch just smiled at the team leader and nodded.

"Right, while I set that up, see what you can do with your own magic to help out, Burnout," he ordered and then vanished, while near-simultaneously numerous amps and other equipment began to appear on the beach.

"My magic?" the blond repeated, and them slapped himself upside the head. "D'oh!"

Meanwhile, at the same moment the gentlemen on the wall were planning their endgame, down on the beach, things had taken a sharp and unpleasant turn.

In a bid for freedom, drawing upon all his instincts for survival, Helmut used all of his strength to get one hand free and reached for the nearest source of purchase, while screaming at the girl that had trapped him, "Not just yet!"

"Oh shit!" was all Rainmaker had time to say before her leg was caught in Helmut's mad grab and began to pull with a strength that she could not match. "I—I can't get away! He's using me to climb out of the quicksand! Ulp—!"

"If I'm going down in this quicksand, then you're coming with me!" he threatened the brown-skinned beauty.

Unfortunately, Helmut was more right than Rainmaker was, since she had barely a fraction of the strength and durability that Fairchild could call upon, she couldn't maintain her position on the grainy soil, so he was dragging her down into the mire more than using her to escape. Fairchild watched it all happen and was briefly paralyzed with indecision. She wanted to jump in and rescue her friend, but even if she could get Sarah free there wouldn't be anything that she could do to actually get them out.

"Sarah!" she cried out, helpless as the Apache's head went under the swirling sand.

"Outta the way, Kat!" Freefall shouted, already floating above the spot where their teammate had disappeared, her hands filled with sky-blue energy.

"But... how will you know where she is in that? And how can you get her instead of him?" she asked.

Roxy's eyes clouded over with magical energy as she focused her Gen-Factor on the quicksand below, and answered, "I know."

Seconds later, Sarah Rainmaker's body came flying out of the mire, sand plastered practically all over her body and in her hair, but judging by that first coughing gasp as she cleared the soil it was clear she was breathing just fine and still alive. The girls quickly retreated back towards where Harry had just finished setting up their teammate's rig.

Right as they joined them, Burnout smiled brightly as he finished flipping through the book of notes that he always kept with him. "Right," he told everybody, "Got it! Let's heat things up for ol' Helmut! [Fervefacio!]" he screamed/intoned while pointing at the quicksand with a particular handsign. If the sand had been roiling before, now it was boiling!

Demonstrating just what one is capable of when faced with imminent demise, Helmut surged out of the boiling quicksand like a trout jumping up stream. Only, they all quickly realized as the armored monster continued to dance and scream, it wasn't the water that Burnout had cast the spell on, but rather the man's armor!

"I think we're ready, Bobby," Harry called out, handing over the young man's guitar.

"Do your stuff, kid!" Lynch ordered, a grim grin on his scarred face.

"Check out this new riff I've been working on Grunge-man!" Bobby said as he started to play.

"Aaagh!" Anna cried out in pain, holding her ears and backing away from the speakers. "Is... is this supposed to be music?!"

"American music, apparently," Harry commented as he pulled out his wand.

"Wicked, my man! It kicks!" Grunge complimented his friend, already 'rocking out' like a stereotypical 'grunge' rocker.

"YEEAAGH!" Helmut screamed in pain, as much from the noise assaulting him as the lingering heat in his suit. "That noise! That horrible noise! STOOOP IIIT!"

"Nah, I think we need more volume," Harry grinned and cast the "Sonorus!" spell on each of the speakers, modifying it so that the enhanced sound would only be directed at Helmut, while it remained the same for everyone else.

"AAAIIYEEAAARGH!" Helmut's cries actually went up in pitch as he was assaulted with a whole new level of sonic attack. "NYEAGH! My—my head! Pain! Unbearable pain!"
"It may be the only chord he knows, but right now it's music to my ears!" Fairchild said as she helped Freefall with clearing the sand off of Rainmaker. "Keep playing, Bobby!"

"The speakers are going to blow any second now!" Harry warned everybody, readying himself to get into the fight. Fortunately, Lynch had a plan.

"Which means we've got to finish Helmut while he's still vulnerable!" said Lynch. "Grunge!"

"What's the plan, Boss?" the suddenly-all-business surfer leapt into action.

"The locking mechanism for Helmut's armor is in his belt! You're going to have to get in close, Grunge, and knock it out of commission!" he ordered.

Almost as he spoke, Grunge was already moving. Helmut was in so much pain from Bobby's 'playing', that he didn't even react when the young Asian surfer got in close and even took time to line up his shot and destroyed the armor's locking mechanism with an over-the-top "KII-YAH!" karate punch. Practically simultaneously with the speakers finally blowing out and the ceasing of the noise of an electric guitar riff, was the klanging noise of Helmut's armor falling right off of his body and into pieces along the beach. Everybody just stood and stared for a moment in full appreciation of what had just happened. Even if that 'appreciation' was mostly disgust at what they were seeing.

"Eeewww!" Roxy pretty much summed up the sight of Helmut in nothing but his undies. "Somebody get the body-wax!"

"And a lot of it," Caitlin agreed.

"What're you all lookin' at?" the nearly-naked green-skinned primate (he had enough hair to count as one anyway) growled at them.

"A giant step backwards in human evolution?" Sarah replied to the 'unmasked' supervillain's question.

"Look, the dude's wearing CK Briefs!" Grunge commented. "And the same color as mine."

"Now that's really gross," Caitlin said, as everyone's faces scrunched up in disgust.

"Better stick to boxers, old man," Roxy said to the defeated villain.

"Enough already!" Helmut shouted. "It's humiliating enough to lose to a bunch of kids! So, what're you going to do with me now, Lynch?"

The answer came soon enough as the next day there was a new photograph in Lynch's study, right next to the last photo he'd taken with Helmut, which was oddly symmetrical, given that both photos had a defeated Helmut hanging in a net as those that defeated him posed for the picture.

Next Day

They were all gathered in what Grunge and Bobby both called the 'War Room', or what Roxy called the 'Creepy Room Niko Talked To Us In', but everybody else called the 'Briefing Room', not that it actually had a title or anything. Harry had asked to speak with everybody, including Lynch. Anna had chores to finish up, and she'd never actually go out on missions, so she was exempt. Of more interesting note was that everybody, even Lynch and Harry, came dressed in their costumes.

"Thanks for coming," Harry started off. He'd foregone the goggles and gauntlets, so it was just him in the crimson and purple tunic uniform rather than Thundercrack speaking to them. "Pleasantries done, down to business. Lynch and I have come to an... agreement about certain things."

"We're finally going on a mission?" Caitlin interrupted with an excited grin.

"You gonna stop naggin' us 'bout our mystic crap?" Grunge whined.

Taking a breath to prepare himself, Harry sat down at the end of the table, opposite Lynch. "Yes, and yes," he answered. "Before any of you say anything else, I've already got a mission for us. Remember that crazy bitch from the future, called herself the Traveller? Well, she escaped from prison last week. And we're going to put her back in there."

They all sat there for a moment or two, digesting that.

"What changed your mind?" Sarah asked.

"You all finally showed me that you can actually control your mystic talents," he said. "Taking down Helmut, while not easy, could've been done with just your Gen-Factors, and in spite of my reminding you all about your mystic powers, the fact remains that you did use them and quite well and with no hesitation or lengthy thought-process. While using spells over your fists and Gen-Factor powers may never be your first instinct, it is clear that you all have enough control and knowledge to handle yourself in a magical environment. Which is why I was so hesitant about bringing you all along on any missions, or even going with you on some of Lynch's missions."

"Speaking of which," the retired Colonel spoke up, leaning forward from his end of the table, "the only reason that I haven't sent you all off on one, is because like Harry here, I was waiting for you to demonstrate that you were good enough. That you could actually survive any mission that I sent you on. Helmut's attack had at least one good outcome as it demonstrated that you all will watch each others backs and be able to handle yourselves if I'm not there. The deal between Harry and myself was that until you all were ready to go with him on his missions, he wouldn't be joining in on any of my missions. Which automatically meant that none of you would be going, as has been made abundantly clear to me."

"He's our leader," Caitlin shrugged as that was answer enough for her.

"And we trust him a lot more than we do you," Roxy added. "Sorry, Mr. L."

"Not a problem, Roxy," Lynch replied, leaning back in his chair. "In that respect, Harry is much like his grandfather. You've all found your leader, someone who'll get you through the worst to come, who will get you through hell and make it out the other side alive. I can respect that. I'll honor that. I'm here for logistical and strategic support. I won't ask that you follow me blindly, but I do have more experience than most of you. Please feel free to use that."

"We'll be sure to do that, John," Harry acknowledged. "Thank you."

"Thanks, Mister Lynch," Caitlin nodded.

"Thanks," said Sarah.

"Yeah, thanks," Bobby smirked.

"Ditto," Grunge and Roxy both said together.

"Back on topic," Harry pulled out his wand and cast a few quick silent spells, activating the holographic projection system and pulling up the appropriate files. For some reason, Stark-Tech could handle wizard spells without any overload. WayneTech hardware was unquestionably more durable, and LCorp had more advanced technology in general, but Stark-Tech computers and software were almost like they'd been designed to be used around supernatural energies. Go figure.

"Traveller, aka Nadia Breslov," he began as the holographic representation of her file from the MIA appeared. "Complete psychopath. Clinically and biologically speaking at that. By all appearances, either she was bred for it, or something was done to her to make her that way. Regardless, she is dangerous and cannot be reasoned with like a normal person. From our last encounter, we know she was looking for some guy that goes by the name of Langston. Probably another time traveler, like she is, but short of causing a major historical event targeted specifically at either one of them, I'm not sure what good that does us. The only good news is that her armor and weapons were all confiscated and secured away, so when she escaped she didn't have any of her advanced technology to call upon. At least... none that we know of. General consensus is that if she did have some kind of hidden future tech still on her, she would've used it long before this point. Means of her escape are still unclear."

"What part of this requires our mystic talents?" Sarah asked.

"She was being held in a magical prison," Harry answered straight forward. "Even though she herself is not a magical, leaving her to the regular authorities is just begging for her to walk right out of there. The wizards holding her managed to keep her locked up for a solid three months. Once we figure out exactly how she escaped, they should be able to hold onto her for good."

"Can't we just send her back to her own time?" Caitlin asked. "Let the authorities of whatever future she's from deal with her?"

"Authorities that apparently trained or transformed her into a psychopath, gave her plasma-weapons, and a personal time machine that protects her from any alterations done to the timeline?" Harry 'innocently' asked.

"I withdraw the question," the redhead timidly retracted.

"I got a question?" Grunge said, actually raising his hand.

Suspecting what that might be, and knowing he'd regret it, Harry went ahead and gestured for the short man to speak up.

"Other than to pound on this crazy chick, again, which I'm totally down with—what exactly do you need the rest of us for?" he asked.

"To find her in the first place, actually," Harry replied. "I've got some stuff being sent over. The very last things that Ms. Breslov was in contact with as a matter of fact. Between Sarah and Roxy, I was hoping to get some idea of where she might've gone next. Meanwhile, you, Caitlin and I would try and figure out how she managed to escape in the first place."

"Whoa? Me? I mean, I know I'm awesome and stuff, and totally down with the fighting and the surfing and stuff, but... I'm not exactly Houdini. I don't do prison breaks!" Grunge protested.

"But you are the closest thing this team has to a ward-expert," Harry pointed out. "Which is what she would've had to get past. Wizard prisons aren't all that big on cameras, laser grids or modern features. They still use walls, cages and guards, but for everything else to raise an alarm, they depend on one of three things; magical creatures, magic wards, or a magical environment. In the case of the latter, just so you know, those prisons only tend to have one prisoner. If you really want to know, please ask."

The way he phrased that last sentence had them all second-guessing and so silence reigned at the table.

"Bobby, after myself, is our most offensive magical," Harry continued when it was clear nobody would ask. "So on the off chance that the Traveller somehow becomes aware of either Roxy or Sarah tracking her, he needs to be on hand to put her on the defensive until the rest of us can get back. I'm the ICW rep, so I'll be needed to even get into the prison, Kat's magic is all geared towards defense, so she may pick up on something that I'd normally miss. And again, Grunge, you really are the closest thing we've got to a wards specialist. Rox, Sarah, I don't know what to ask for really. I'm hoping that you can scry for her, or otherwise divine her location, but..." he trailed off and shrugged.

"I know a few different spells," Roxy shrugged. "Might work. It would give us an 'at-the-time' location, but if she's moving, or leaves soon after, wouldn't do us much good."

"If you have something of hers, then yes, I can scry for her," Sarah remarked. "Just... why is somebody, that uses future tech, considered a mystic threat?"

"Because magic is the only thing that stopped her the last time," Harry then explained about his side of their fight with the Traveller.

M.A.C.U.S.A. Magical Penitentiary

Florida Keys, FL

The Maximum Security Wizard Prison for the continental United States was, interestingly enough, within a few miles of one of the mundane Maximum Security Prisons. Nautical miles that is. The Magical Congress of the United States of America's Magical Penitentiary was located on one of the isolated islands known colloquially as the Florida Keys. It was heavily warded and had more than a few standard—magical—protections on it, so no interstate bridge connected it to the mainland. In fact, without magical talents, one couldn't even see the island from a distance, and it was abolished from any and all maps, digital or otherwise.

Primarily a prison for wizards, similar to Azkaban for the Brits, there was a lot of red tape to get through to even be permitted access to its location, let alone what would be needed for a full and proper investigation. Though he was considered an international hero, and his status with the ICW, Harry still had to fill out an eye-watering amount of paperwork, in triplicate, per person, before he, Caitlin and Grunge could step foot on the isolated island's shore. And again, wizard prison. Apparation and PortKeys and similar transportation were specifically blocked all around the island, extending several miles out to sea in all directions, and having a boat 'vanish' off the coast of US territorial waters would defeat the purpose of a secret magic prison. Therefore, the only way on and off of the island was via submarine. A wizard-enhanced submarine, but still.

For further security, the sub didn't actually dock with any part of the island, rather a specialized 'Bubble' Charm was cast over visitors and then shot off towards a special receiving area. The sub would then turn around and return to the mainland, without even having crossed the outermost borders of the wards. When leaving, the sub would be signaled, and the same Bubble would be put over them and they'd be shot out to just inside of the ward line, the Bubble sinking to the bottom, where it would vanish within one hour if the sub failed to pick them up on time.

For the record, Caitlin paid close attention when the spell was cast the first time and was confident she'd be able to either keep the spell going, or cast it anew if it failed at any point when they left.

"I think I'm gonna be sick," Grunge gasped as he bent over, holding his knees, struggling to avoid throwing up.

"It wasn't that bad," Caitlin remarked, adjusting her 'witch' robes after their rather brusque arrival. Interestingly, they were more akin to some kind of Ren-Fair/Steampunk style dress rather than what most would consider 'robes' in today's society. She actually kind of liked it... or she would if she could get rid of the corset part of it at any rate.

"Just be grateful that Portkeys don't work here," Harry grumbled, fixing his own, more officious crimson robes and wand-concealing gauntlets. "Up you get, Edmund. We're here on official business after all."

"Oh, uh, too right you are, guv'nuh-er!" Grunge exclaimed in a horrid English accent.

"Don't ever do that again," Harry glared at the shorter man, who properly cowered and silently nodded.

"Gentlemen," Caitlin interrupted. "Game faces on, so to speak."

Right before she'd spoken, the welcoming committee, such as it was, had arrived. Three guards, dressed much as any member of the American Department of Corrections, only with wands on their holsters rather than guns among other magical devices, alongside two people in robes, one of whom actually included a decorated bandoleer marking that individual as the defacto warden of the prison. Interestingly enough, though no one would dare to bring it up, the warden was a five-foot-five witch with white-blond hair, and the second person was a six-foot-plus Native American wizard with broad shoulders... and judging from both his attire and other accessories he sported, he was the warden's secretary, rather than second in command.

"Mister Potter," the warden greeted the ICW Hit-Wizard. "What an honor. I must say, nobody expected you to take such an... active interest in a case such as this. I'm the warden of the M.A.C.U.S.A. Magical Penitentiary, Wanda Walden. And this is my Personal Assistant, John Stormfeather. We are, of course, doing everything in our power to determine the weakness in our security and endeavoring to plug the leak as quickly as possible."

"Of that, I have no doubt, Madam Warden," Harry said, his English accent on full. Here, among his own people, so to speak, he didn't have to pretend or hide who he truly was. "And I'm not here to place blame or do anything to get anyone in trouble. I just need all the information that I can possibly get if I am to capture the escapee as soon as possible. How quickly can you show us her cell?"

"I'll take you there personally," the warden confirmed, then her face winced slightly. "However, there are security protocols in place that we must follow. I'm sure you understand..."

"Of course I do," Harry replied, already following along behind their escorts. "Like I said, I'm not here to cause anybody any trouble. And I'm not the sort of person that you should compromise security for anyway. My team and I left our wands and other Foci back on the mainland in preparation for this. Nevertheless, warden, any expediting that could be done would be appreciated." With that, he gave the woman a significant look, with a brief side-glance towards Caitlin.

"Nothing to worry about there, Mister Potter," the older woman nodded in understanding. "We are all magicals here. And even if one of your companions was a No-Mag, I can guarantee you that all of my people are the utmost professionals."

They passed a security troll, who just so happened to be in the middle of picking his rather large nose right as they went by. Pink tinged the warden's pale cheeks, while her 'secretary' glared at the uniformed beast, whipping him into shape.

"In my experience, Madam Warden," he said, "professionalism doesn't always equal up to capability. One of the laziest, most self-centered slobs that you could ever meet turned out to be one of the most loyal and dedicated soldiers I had at my side during the Defeat of the Death Eaters. I don't care how tidy the uniforms are kept, or how polite your people are on surprise inspections. I care that they can, and will do the jobs they've been hired to do, and that they do them better than anybody else in the country, let alone the world. That is all that I care about."

"Yes, well..." the woman seemed to be at a loss. Fortunately, they'd arrived at the security check point.

What followed was typical screening, only with a 'ward portal' rather than a metal detector. Basically an archway utilizing the same principals as the Portal at Nine and Three Quarters, or even the Veil of Death, except instead of transporting you to another place, it focused all the energy of the wards onto one spot, so if any part of you, or your equipment wasn't registered in with the wards, well... let's just say that you wouldn't be walking out the other side of the arch. There was also a 'pat down', though done magically, which just meant a bunch of different summoning spells was shot at the lot of them and in this case nothing so much as fluttered their clothing, because they'd left everything behind. Besides, the three of them were all the weapons they'd need to defend themselves, and they were all confident about that.

Now in the prison proper, they quickly made their way, via escort, through the labyrinthine complex to the Traveller's former cell and the area where she spent most of her time. There was more security at each checkpoint and section, but that merely served to prove just how secure this prison was. Which, of course, made the question of how she escaped all the more pertinent.

"Anything yet, Grunge?" Harry asked as they made their way through the final set of wards between them and their destination.

Shaking his head, the suddenly serious Kekkaishi said, "Nah. Every barrier we've come up against is fully charged. No weaknesses. There might be a crack somewhere out of sight, but... the harmonics would be off, y'know? I can feel it. Everything is kosher with the wards, man."

"Kat?" Harry prompted.

The tall redhead took a long, calculating look at the cell block they were now in, and especially Nadia's cell in particular. "I don't see how she could have just walked out of here. Even if she used magic, which I seriously doubt at this point, there is no route to the outside, and every way in and out of each cell block is heavily guarded. Even if the extra guards are a new measure in response to her escape, I'm assuming there's always at least one on duty at each checkpoint?" She asked this of the warden directly.

"Two," came the quick reply. "Every checkpoint has a minimum of two guards, one on either side of the ward portals. I've doubled the guards in light of this... incident."

"Caitlin, Edmund," Harry told them, "Stay here and see if you can figure anything out from her cell itself. Where is her armor? Her possessions? I want to see that now."

"John can show you," the warden indicated her Native American shadow. "Most of her armor was confiscated and held by the MIA. The power pack, weapons, and what was identified as the device that allowed her time travel. The rest was impounded and put with the majority of our prisoners' personal effects. John, please escort Mr. Potter to the Closet. I'll remain here with the rest of Mr. Potter's team."

"Yes, Madam Warden," he acknowledged and lead Harry back out of the cell block.

"Let me know when you guys find something," Harry said in parting.

"Sure thing, dude," Grunge called after him, while Caitlin remained focused on studying the structure around them. There was something... off, about the dimensions of this place, but she just couldn't put her finger on it.

"So," the warden spoke up, trying to make conversation by all appearances, "how long have you been working with Mister Potter? He's quite famous, you know."

"Harry?" Grunge blurted out, "Nah, we're old friends by now. Known him, what? Almost a full year now, Kat?"

"About that," the redhead confirmed distractedly.

"Course, we've been in a few scrapes with him," Grunge went on to say, "but this is the first time he's let us help him out with one of his cases. Apparently we weren't 'good enough' to help him out before." He held up his fingers to make very sarcastic air quotes.

"I thought that the ICW never assigned teams of Hit-Wizards to cases like this," the warden went on to say. "Hit-Wizard teams are normally only formed when dealing with high-level criminals that have never been caught before. Usually for the ones that never will be caught, if you catch my meaning."

Frowning, as she understood what the warden was saying all too well, Caitlin mostly ignored her as she entered the Traveller's cell directly, keeping one hand on the wall at all times. There was something...

Grunge, on the other hand, had no compunctions about 'flirting' with a semi-attractive older woman, which is how he saw the conversation from the start. "Well, we're not just any team. We're like, the foremost experts in our fields. Take me for example. I just so happen to be one of the highest level, non-affiliated, kekkaishi around. That's right. If it has anything to do with any kind of magic barrier, I am the man."

"Oh? That's... surprising," the warden said, sounding more confused than impressed.

Sensing that, Grunge tried to change topics slightly. "Uh, Kat here, she's like this super-impressive sorceress, or something. Say, uh, Kat? What kinda magic do you use again?"

Rolling her eyes, Caitlin answered from inside the cell, too distracted by her analysis to really consider the consequences, "All of them, Grunge. My magic specializes in protection and defensive magics, but I can use everything from wizardry, witchcraft, and general magic to sorcery, magecraft and chi magic. Something is wrong in here."

Interrupted from her encroaching accusations, the warden rushed forward and asked, "What is it?"

"I'm not sure," Caitlin confessed. "I may need to see one or two other cells to be sure, but..." She walked over to the wardrobe in the corner of the ten by ten by ten cell and tapped on it, "Is this supposed to be here?"

At the same time, Harry was making his own discoveries as he looked over the Traveller's personal effects. In particular, the parts of her armor/costume that were left behind. It was all blue or indigo of various shades.

"This is not her armor," he declared with a glare.

"I'm sorry, sir?" John asked, confused.

'The Closet' was mostly self-explanatory, it was the area, segregated and just as guarded as all the other areas, where all of the personal property of the numerous prisoners was kept. Sometimes, that included wands and other foci, mostly it just meant old clothes and knickknacks. The warden's secretary, John Stormfeather and Harry were the only people in the warehouse-like room, looking over the contents of the wooden crate holding the Traveller's armor. Of course, magic was involved, so the crate itself was no bigger than a typical empty apple-crate. Didn't change the fact that it held the wrong armor though.

"This," he held up the bluish 'breast-plate' and an indigo-hued gauntlet in either hand. "It's the wrong armor. It's not even the same color, let alone anything else about it. What are you people trying to pull here?" Harry demanded, facing 'John' full-on.

"... I'm not sure I understand what you're implying, sir?" the massive Native American wizard retorted.

Harry closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to massage out the tension he felt forming there. "Was the Traveller ever even at this facility?"

"Yes sir, she was," the secretary replied, holding forth a file folder. "This is the transcript and documentation of her transfer to this facility from the MIA."

"..." Harry frowned as he accepted the folder and opened it, took one look at the picture on the inside, cursed, and ran back to Caitlin and Grunge at the escapee's cell, not bothering wasting any time on cursing.

Meanwhile, inside the cell, the warden was looking at the contents of the escaped prisoner's accommodations, possibly for the first time ever, because the woman was clearly surprised to see a full-sized dressing wardrobe in there, when the entire place should have been a cube, with maybe a single slab that 'grew' out of the wall for a bed when it was Lights Out, and a hole in the corner for expelling waste. Caitlin saw the warden's reaction and reacted herself, by punching the wardrobe and knocking it to the furthest point inside the cell away from the door. To her, as much as anyone else's, but mostly her's, absolute shock, the wardrobe did not explode in a shower of splinters, rather the sound of a meaty fist hitting a meatier wall and a groan of pain came from the no-longer-a-wardrobe wardrobe.

There was a brief blur, and an off-color unarmored version of Nadia Breslov appeared where the flying wardrobe had been moments before. 'She' was rubbing a bruised cheek, but otherwise showed no signs of discomfort.

"That was almost impressive, primitive," 'Nadia' said. "How did you see through my masking technology? Primitives and fossils, such as yourselves are too stupid to figure it out on your own."

The voice was spot on. The condescending tone, and even the words were almost exactly what Fairchild might've expected the Traveller to say upon seeing the time-lost villain again. She even looked exactly like her. There was, however, one or two things that really stood out that told the redheaded amazon that this was not Nadia Breslov, aka the Traveller. One, the violent harpy had been about as subtle as a brick to the face. It wasn't in her nature to 'hide' or use 'masking technology', even if she did actually have it, which was exceedingly unlikely. Two, while she looked exactly like the pictures Caitlin had seen of the woman in Harry's files, the woman beneath the purple and violet armor, her coloring was just a shade off from the same woman she'd fought in Oregon all those months ago. Mostly in her skin tone and hair, and while that could be explained away by her incarceration, typically that was in being paler, or a darker blond... not with bluish skin and chlorine-dye-job-green hair.

Plus, despite the whole now-has-pupils-rather-than-whited-out-eyes thing, there was no look of madness and uncontrolled rage in her eyes like the last time Fairchild had seen her. This, was not the same woman.

Fortunately, at about the same moment that this changeling had revealed 'herself', Harry arrived... by appearing out of thin air without a sound. He then punched the fake Nadia in the solar plexus and pinched the nape of her neck, and the creature crumbled in his hands, reverting to a thorny green-brown skeleton-thing that Fairchild had no clue as to what it was. The warden, apparently did, as she screamed and scrambled back out of the room. Harry quickly dragged Caitlin out after her, mere moments before the room was once again magically sealed.

"What the hell?!" Fairchild screamed. "Harry, what is that?" she pointed.

"In layman's terms?" he frowned. "A changeling. In actuality, a spriggan. Judging from its color-blindness, and shape of its wings there, I'd say it is a Central American Spriggan, native to Costa Rica. Those further north have more jagged wingtips, and there are no spriggans to be found south of Panama. They call themselves something else, obviously, not to mention their color blindness is total, not just mixing up shades of blue and red. They are magical creatures that can shapeshift. Question is, why is this one pretending to be an escaped prisoner."

"Better question would be if the Traveller was ever a prisoner here at all," she mused, as they made their way to the exit point, following after the warden.

"..." Harry opened his mouth to say something, and then closed it, as he realized she had a point. "I'll make some calls once we're back on the mainland. Hopefully Roxy and Sarah have had better luck."

Lynch Villa

Sunnydale, CA

"Any luck?" Bobby asked his teammates as they stepped back inside from the beach where the pair had been trying to scry for their adversary, out from under the influence of the house's wards apparently.

"Define luck," Roxy scowled.

"Apparently," Sarah answered, "whoever last wore that garment that Harry got for us is actually still in the prison that they're off visiting right now. Fortunately, I remembered that Kat had kept some of that wiring from the Traveller's suit, and we used that to try and locate her."

"Turns out she doesn't exist anymore," Roxy grumbled, plopping down on the sofa with a bag of snacks. "And yet she does. It's this whole paradox thing going on. Good news is, we can confirm that she's on the Continental United States. Bad news is, we can't narrow it down any further than that. She could be in New York City, or right next door, and everywhere inbetween, same results either way."

"Have we heard from the others yet?" Sarah asked, ignoring her morose teammate's mood for the moment. Bobby shook his head.

"Not since they called early in the morning, saying they were leaving for the prison," he replied. "Harry did warn us that they wouldn't be able to reach us until they were back on the mainland anyway, so..."

The phone rang.

"Maybe that's him now," Bobby raced over and picked up the receiver. "Hello—"

"Hey," Harry's voice came over the line. "It's me. Any luck yet?"

"Nah," Bobby sighed. "We were actually hoping that you'd have gotten something more to go off of. Apparently whoever was wearing that piece of evidence you got for the girls, they're still in that same prison."

"Yeah," he could hear the annoyance and anger from his team leader through the phone. "Turns out the Traveller was never incarcerated in the first place. They put a shapeshifter in her place. Have you found anything at all?"

"Well," he said, walking back into the room with Roxy and Sarah, "Sarah had the bright idea to use some of the wiring that Kat kept from that hi-tech suit of hers. But Roxy says that the results are too inconclusive. All they can say for certain is that she's somewhere on the Continental United States."

"..." Bobby frowned at the uneasy silence that answered this statement, and he soon understood why when Harry asked, in a scared tone, "Bobby, did they mean within the borders of the US... or within the borders of the Hellmouth?"

"Uh... Dunno, let me check," he pulled the phone away and asked the two scryers, "Hey, Harry wants to know if that last spell of yours means he was anywhere within the borders of the US, or within the borders of the Hellmouth?"

They both froze and simultaneous expressions of wide-eyed fear and realization crossed their faces.

"Um, I'm going to say, the latter, Harry," Bobby said. Right after that, there was the sound of an explosion from outside somewhere. "How quickly can you guys get back here?!"

"We're on our way!" Harry shouted and then the line disconnected.

The three mystic gen-actives stood there, staring at one another, until another explosion rocked the neighborhood. Eyes wide, they made a unanimous decision, voiced by Bobby, Burnout saying out loud, "Maybe we should, you know, get outside before whatever that is wrecks the house or whatever?"

Fortunately, in anticipation of trouble, all three of them were already in their uniforms, and all three of them were the 'flyers' of the team, so they quickly took to the skies and had a birds-eye view of the situation.

The Traveller had found them.

And she'd brought friends.

Sunnydale Outskirts

He'd broken all sorts of rules just to get them here in time, and he feared they would still be too late. For one thing, the Warden and her people wouldn't just 'let them leave', not without some kind of quarantine debriefing thing that would pretty much guarantee the rest of his team being killed. Or worse, captured and taken by the people they were on the run from. He was also pretty sure that if he'd allowed them to be held at the prison for any longer than he had, they would have found themselves with permanent visitor passes, to coin a phrase.

As it was, Harry found himself throwing around as much weight as his reputation, badge, and position as an international celebrity known for defeating the worst Dark Lord in Europe's history, to get them to the exit portal. From there, he just had Fairchild and Grunge both use their combined abilities to recreate the protective shield that would allow them to survive the trip through the water, and then he got them to the surface and then beyond the reach of the wards. From there he'd Disapparated them the rest of the way back to the Mainland, where he again used his role as an ICW Hit-Wizard to commission an immediate Portkey back to Sunnydale.

He knew the basic spell-work, but the finer points still eluded him. Given his current emotional state, they could just as easily end up in the villa's living room as they could in the demon-infested catacombs beneath the city, or even on the other side of the planet from the Hellmouth. As it was, the professional Portkey-maker could only get them to the very edge of the Hellmouth's influence, which is to say just outside the city limits.

"Harry, stop!" Caitlin ordered, holding her friend and team leader by the shoulder to keep him from running off. "Just... wait a minute, would you? If you run yourself to exhaustion, then you'll be no good to us in the actual fight, if there is one! Geez, look at you! You ran us along the ocean floor and then swam us to the surface before doing that teleporting trick of yours, and then ran us all the way to a back-alley magic shop in downtown Miami, fifty miles from where we'd landed... Harry, just... rest for a minute. Regain your strength. Grunge and I will get us to the Villa."

"Yeah, uh, I'm not sure we've gotta worry about that," Grunge spoke up, pointing towards the beach side of town. They looked, and could see smoke rising into the late afternoon sky.

"Sorry Kat," Harry said, shrugging off her hand. "Duty calls."

Before she could stop him, he'd Accelerated and was running off to scout what was going on. He knew he was running on empty as it was, but something inside him would not let him rest. Not yet.

As it turns out, he soon found out, he probably should have listened to his teammate.

The fires, as results of explosions, were from a gang of horgath demons, Asian-looking humanoids that could breath fire, as well as what looked to be members of the Scourge with skin-wrapped rotting demon corpses walking around with bladed weapons. And there, at the head, was the crazy blond in purple armor, shooting out plasma blasts like they were going out of style, Nadia Breslov, the Traveller. How the hell she got mixed up with demons, after working alone and calling him a fossil, he had no clue, but it was clear she needed to be stopped.

Remembering all too well the last time he'd gotten 'too close' to her and her time-travel-armor, Harry kept his distance and tried to work his way to the Villa and join up with the rest of his team. Before he could get there, however, everything around him staggered, jumping forward in time, or rather... unfreezing in time. It was only after this that he felt the hunger pangs.

Maybe, he thought to himself as he snapped back to regular, slow, time, he should have taken Kat's advice and eaten something?

The demons noticed him immediately and pounced the moment after.

Yeah, definitely should've taken Kat's advice.

Lynch Villa (aka the battleground)

Back near the edge of town, Caitlin was cursing as Harry vanished before their eyes. Knowing that every moment passing he was further and further away, she turned to her only remaining teammate and snarled at him, "Grunge! We've got to get after him! He could get killed! Now! Are you going to help, or am I just going to have to throw you back home and then jump after you, or are you going to help?"

"Help! I'm definitely going to help! I choose the second one!" the shorter man shouted, holding up his hands in surrender.

"Good," she growled, glowering down at him. "Now, do you have a way to get us back home quick enough, or do we try my idea?"

"Uh..." he gulped, mind racing, and then one particular night-time adventure in Japan came to mind. "I... might have an idea. But I'm going to hate it."

"I'm all ears," she crossed her arms.

"You know the kekkai spell, right?" he confirmed. "Hoi, Jouso, Ketsu?"

She nodded and silently demonstrated by forming a single green-glowing cube with a wave of her fingers. He nodded in return, then quickly formed his own red-glowing cube, forced to use the incantation, about six or seven feet in the air, about the size of a generic crate. Then he jumped up and landed feet-first upon it. Looking back, he nodded, then formed another cube a further distance away and jumped across the distance even as the first began to dissolved.

Quickly catching on, Caitlin jumped as high as she could, and then only when she was on the downward arc did she raise her fingers and form a kekkai to catch herself. She jumped and did the same again, always making sure to head in the direction of the fighting. Further below her, Grunge doubled his pace, forming and dispelling kekkais close enough that he could just run across them rather than having to jump and leap as Caitlin was doing. Using this method, the two remaining members of Gen13 were soon falling down toward their home and the battlefield surrounding it.

The only good news that they could see of the situation was that the streets were remarkably empty, so it was just the gang of ugly monsters and the three flying (and two platforming) Gen-Actives on the streets. There was plenty of bad news to go around, starting with the fact that the monsters had an unconscious Harry in their grasp! And they were taking him straight to the Traveller!

Like Hell!

Caitlin jumped one final time, but she didn't bother constructing a kekkai to stop her fall. Rather, she angled herself so that she was falling fist-first right at the purple-armored blond's head!

"Hey BITCH!" she screamed as her fist landed at the villain went flying. "GET OFF MY LAWN!"

"Really, Kat?" Grunge shook his head, disappointed. "Get off the lawn? What are you, eighty?"

Roxy's eyes flashed white for just a moment, a moment in which something became abundantly clear to her. She flew over and used her gravity powers to stop all of the fire-breathers in their tracks, the rest of the demons being strong enough to ignore the excess weight dragging them down. When the two groups were clearly separated, she shouted over to Bobby.

"Burnout!" she screamed. "Leave the Kung-Fu-Dragon-wannabes alone! They can control fire, same as you! The rest are all yours! Rainmaker! Light those flame-suckers up!"

Each of her fellow flyers understood what she was saying, and both moved to opposite ends of the street, targeting one group each. Sarah held her hands out to the side and raised her face to the heavens and began to chant in a mixture of her native language mixed with certain original-Latin phrases. The skies darkened with heavy rainclouds. Bobby shot off a plasma burst between the horgath and Scourge demons marking a scorched line in the street. He then fired off a series of handsigns and his own original-Latin phrases, runes appearing in flame all along the scorch line. To finish it off, he quickly boxed the Scourge demons in, trailing a line of scorched earth and glowing flame runes. Then he held his hands above him and called out in a language that humans had no say in inventing.

Sarah cast down both hands, triggering her magically-augmented Amp-Bands while simultaneously completing the spell she'd cast. Lightning poured down like rain from both her hands and the skies, landing only upon those she'd designated as targets, namely the horgath demons.

Bobby held a giant fireball in one hand, a small gift from the Spirit of Fire that he had called upon, fueled and enhanced by his own powers, and threw it down into the center of the area the Scourge monsters were trapped withing. The flame, which had the potential to ignite the atmosphere and burn down the whole town, never left the confines of the scorch marks that he'd laid down, though the flames did reach rather high, he made sure the heat never got any further past him, and if anything helped to fuel the rain that was beginning to fall even now thanks to Rainmaker's spell.

Down on the ground, the small handful of monsters not caught by the wholesale slaughter brought about by Gen13, took off, leaving behind the pitiful human that had appeared in their midst, aka Thundercrack. Grunge was quick to get to him, while Fairchild went after Traveller.

"This time, you're going to prison, and you're staying there!" the redhead promised, holding the psychopath up by the throat.

The white-eyed blond grinned through her bloodied teeth, and replied, "Sorry, cavegirl, I've got other plans." Then she unleashed a point-blank plasma blast to Fairchild's face.

Protection magic or not, there is no denying basic physics. As strong and resistant to damage as she was, the young mystic had no way to counter the raw force being directed at her. She was knocked back and away from her adversary, forced to let go. And while she was back up and little more than bruised within seconds, she was still blasted over fifty feet away. Distance enough that she couldn't close it fast enough to prevent the Traveller from attacking her other teammates.

"Ah!" she screamed in delight, aiming at Harry and Grunge. "There's the little fossil that bested me before! I'm going to enjoy this!" She fired a single-handed plasma blast at Harry's prone form.

"Ketsu!" Grunge called, holding his pointer and middle fingers out even as the pulse of magic traced the outline and the kekkai formed as fast as the crazy lady's energy attack. He grimaced, but breathed a sigh of relief when the energy trickled out and failed to penetrate his barrier.

"Learned some new tricks, have you?" the psychopath cackled, absentmindedly knocking Fairchild back with another energy blast, this one aimed at her feet so she was knocked away in an overhead arc. "Well, thanks to my new benefactor, so have I!" She brought both her forearms together and the tech there connected and reformed into a much larger blaster, one clearly capable of dishing out a great deal more punishment.

Gulping, Grunge did the only thing he could do. He reached down to his material-laden belt and used his powers to shift to platinum, before reforming the kekkai handsign with his right hand and intoned anew, "Hoi! Jousu! KETSU!"

Counting the existing red cube barrier already around him and Harry, a total of five kekkai appeared, one inside the other, around the vulnerable members of Gen13. At the precise moment that the Five-Barrier-Kekkai completed, Traveller fired the full-powered Plasma Blast at them. It splashed against the outermost cube, cracked, and punched through within a second. It hit the next, cracked, broke through, and then again, though it had taken at least two seconds for it to do so. Grunge was definitely feeling the strain now.

The foot-wide energy beam hit the fourth kekkai, splashed against it for another three full seconds before cracking, the cracks growing and deepening for another two full seconds before finally punching through with only a few inches of energy bleed-through coming through. It stopped against the innermost barrier and it wasn't until it had stopped completely that he noticed the Traveller's weapon had run out of energy. He quickly reformed the broken barriers with but a thought, just in case she tried to hit him again, but judging from the way her backpack-thing was smoking and she was scowling at her separate-once-again arm blasters, that wasn't an option for her.

Fortunately for the team, before she could regain her energy or fix her weapons, the rest of Gen13 arrived and laid into the villain. She tried to blast them away, but Fairchild had learned her lesson, and cast diffusing spells around herself and the rest of the team, making the Traveller's tactic of knocking them back all but useless.

Freefall held the woman in place with her own localized gravity field, while Rainmaker adjusted the windspeed around her so she couldn't catch her breath, and Burnout made sure her equipment stayed overheated. Then Fairchild walked right up to the woman, smirked, and punched her in the face as hard as she could. It was too much for the time traveling villain's personal forcefield, and the woman was knocked out.

When Harry came too, only a few minutes later, to the smell of Anna's cooking no less, he found himself in the company of a rather smug Gen13, and a naked and trussed up supervillain. Well, mostly naked. Her armor and weapons and the suit she'd had on beneath it all was removed, so she was just in a old pair of underwear the gang had lying around.

Taking one look at their smug faces, the captured villain, and the armor (which incidentally, he noted, had magic-infused runes inscribed upon it), Harry Potter just sighed and said, "Fine. Fine, fine, fine! We'll start going on missions. Twist my arm, why don't you!"

They all smiled. Grunge and Roxy high-fived each other. Caitlin came up and hugged the green-eyed wizard, before handing him one of his snack bars to eat.

End Issue 02