Yankee Poodle

Trisha Rittenhouse, U.S. Marshal, WitSec, lied to get some days off.

"My cousin Zach was on the oil refinery platform that exploded. He's missing." Poor cousin Zach. He got into a lot of trouble over the years. One might get suspicious, but the proper paperwork was always submitted.

The Canine hadn't intended to head off to Mexico when she got home from her anti-stove-piping meeting. Not for the weird guns and not for the Pig Iron golem (she assumed that Voight would help Peter build a new one if needed). But the reports that came in bothered her... a boatload of coldblood children escaping with one adult mammal worker being picked up by the Mexican Coast Guard. That fit in with what Waldo told her last night.

What bothered her was that the Secretaría de Marina seemed to have misplaced that heroic worker before the ship docked. The outgoing documents didn't name him; didn't even mention his species or the man's position on the boat. There wasn't even a stub indicating that a secret or secure document existed. Such sloppiness might happen with the Mexican police force, but Armed Forces, even Mexico's civil Coast Guard, were built on paperwork.

And more alarming, no one seemed to notice that he was missing.

The children were in deep torpor and not at all conscious. They were naked and unidentified; moved to a children's hospital to bring them out of it safely. The American Embassy was sending a doctor from the states to help revive them, as this deep torpor wasn't something you'd see in warmer climate. Yes, it got cold overnight in Mexico, but these Children were severely exposed apparently.

That didn't jive with Waldo's statement that the Children had been hiding from Pig Iron just before the explosion. Of course, Waldo could have been making an assumption based on incomplete data. Could Peter have been broadcasting? Rita made a note to ask Waldo in the morning.

Peter had amnesia.

Pig Iron had never really been vulnerable to mind control. Would an Idiot Gun affect him?

Would an Idiot Gun allow someone to effectively vanish off a boat? Such a targeted Omission seemed unlikely with a gun like that.

But, a Idiot Gun might induce Torpor in a Reptile if exposed to it in a prolonged or repeated way. Her casual reading of the available fact-sheets seemed to indicate Reptiles were more vulnerable to the mind-altering affects of ray gun like that. But that might be specism rearing screwing the results a bit.

So, it was up to the girl with the built-in faraday cage to take a look.

She typed out a quick scrambled text to Sam and Allie, letting them know where she was going and why. She needed to find that hero.

It was probably nothing, but if Tarkis was some how involved with the Idiot Gun Factory; then they needed to know.