The call from Tom had come at a good time. Mystique had been lounging beside a swimming pool, disguised as an attractive blonde with a little white bikini. Ordinarily, she would be very angry to receive a phone call when she was in the middle of a job. This time, her job was to impersonate someone and be very visible lounging in a luxurious resort for a week. A week of spa treatments, sunbathing, a bit of shopping, and relaxation, catered by blue ribbon chefs. She'd stayed in houses smaller than the suite at this hotel.
Mystique had wondered just why Emma Frost was paying her a nice sum of money to impersonate her on vacation, but hadn't asked. The logical reasoning was that Emma Frost had plans for that week, and not only did she not want anyone to know what those plans were, she wanted a rather visible and solid alibi. Visible and solid enough to pay for an impersonator and pay for the vacation that Mystique was currently enjoying. All she had to remember was to only wear white and revealing, and to stick to Emma Frost's dietary preferences, and to be noticed.
It was very easy to be noticed looking like Emma Frost. There weren't as many jobs like this as she'd like...
Tom Cassidy had asked her to help him out with a few things regarding his daughter. She'd known that he had one with his ex wife, but she had been under the impression that the ex-wife had full custody and had denied Tom visitation rights due to his criminal record. Apparently, his daughter had been caught up in some sort of mess that traced back to a man named Quentin Travers, who ran an international organization based in London England. An organization that claimed to be a historical society, kept tabs on girls, and told those girls that they were destined to fight monsters. A man who viewed these girls as expendable tools.
While Mystique viewed most people as expendable tools, she disliked the idea of raising girls to be expendable weapons. Especially if they weren't training them to survive and fight in the modern world, but something closer to the middle ages crossed with the darker folklore.
After a few moment's thought, she'd agreed to find this particular goose and get some information out of him. The fact that Tom didn't particularly care if the man was injured or maimed was an added bonus. He'd quite understood that she was in the middle of something when he called and couldn't start the goose chase until Saturday.
She hadn't told Tom what sort of job she was committed to until Saturday. It was bad form to talk about one's jobs, especially when they weren't finished.
Saturday, when she was no longer being Emma Frost, Mystique looked over the information that Tom had sent to one of her emails. It contained some information on Travers - not a full biography, but the basics. A recent photograph, full name and date of birth, the address of his organization and where in that building his office was located, and the fact that he was presumed fully and genetically normal human.
More than enough for her to get started, especially since she wasn't on someone else's timetable for this.
Changing to someone else had enabled her to travel to England with no troubles. While Emma Frost turned heads, a rounded old woman with thick glasses and thinning grey curls was ignored by almost everyone. Changing into a twenty-something college student with a clipboard allowed her to get an initial survey of the area around the building where Travers worked, and to get a good look at her target. The old building looked like a well-preserved example of Victorian architecture, except for the brand new wooden door and frame, which didn't go at all with the rest of the building.
She impersonated the janitor to get a better look inside, giving the real one a few hundred pounds and pointing the fellow towards a decent pub. Nobody paid attention to janitors, and it let her get an idea of the building's layout, and the chance to look for defenses.
By the end of the day, Mystique had learned a few things, not all of them equally useful. Tom had left quite the impression and caused the need for the poorly matched new door. There were no interior surveillance cameras. The janitor was worked very hard and not paid enough. They had much better quality tea on the second floor than in the common lounge and awful stuff that would be prepared and served to visitors. Nobody liked Quentin Travers. They were currently spying on thousands of girls and teenagers across the globe, claiming that they had the potential to become Slayers, and some of them had been removed from their families to better 'raise them according to the Council's traditions.' And that they weren't satisfied with Tom's daughter Faith being in prison, they wanted her dead.
Before the end of her day as the janitor was done, she had decided to kill Quentin Travers. Oh, not here, and not before she'd wrung every last bit of useful information out of him about everything, but he would die. Slowly and in great pain.
The Council of Watcher's real janitor was too hung over to go in the next day, so Mystique took his place again, encouraging him to rest with a well placed tap to the back of the head. Had he been alert and paying attention, it wouldn't have done any more than make him angry. With his wobbly, hung over misery, it put him right back unconscious. Checking with a few scraps of things written about the apartment – no, in England they were flats, she had to remember to use the right terms for the country she was in – she forged a note in his own scrawl that he'd called in sick and had the next two days off work.
She took photographs of the file on Faith, as well as the fragmentary plans to kill her. The page working out that if they succeeded in Faith's death within the next four weeks, the new Slayer would be Miranda in New Zealand got photographed as well, even if she wasn't quite certain what to think about it yet. It would be something to question Travers about once they were somewhere private.
Her explorations uncovered a locked cabinet. The lock was so simple that she was probably in almost as fast as someone with a key would have been. Once opened, the cabinet proved to contain several different drugs. One was some sort of strange almost green fluid that she was unfamiliar with. She grabbed half a dozen, intending to have it analyzed later. Others included a variety of sedatives, antibiotics, and anesthetics – none of which should be in an office.
In the end, Mystique took a simple approach to removing Travers. She used a sedative that had been stored in a locked room to render him unconscious. Some ropes and a few coats turned him into a portable bundle. She put in a few hours of shuffling papers wearing Travers' face to keep his apparent routine. Travers appeared to leave at five, just as he had the past few days. She slipped back into the building, changed to someone a bit stronger, a burly looking workman in faded blue overalls with a nametag reading Dobson. The next step was wrapping Travers in a stained, old carpet that had been set aside for disposal and carrying the whole bundle out the back door.
She even had a couple of the people in the building hold doors open for 'Dobson.'
The old carpet was shoved into the back of a hauling van and 'Dobson' began a slow drive out of London. The bundle of carpet was pulled out at a trash facility, minus Travers. After giving him another dose of sedative, Mystique went back to the edge of London, used the cover of dark to shove the unconscious Travers into the boot of her rented car, and returned the van to the company where she'd borrowed it from earlier in the day. She wasn't certain if anyone would even realize that it hadn't remained in the parking lot the whole time.
When Travers finally woke up, he was already tied to a solid old chair in a remote hunting lodge, stripped down to his boxers and socks. While the inevitable effects of cold, embarrassment, and uncertainty would help in the situation, Mystique's primary motivation had been to search him for any form of communications device or weapon. The only light came from a couple candles that she'd lit, and none of those were positioned in front of him. Mystique had no reason to let him get a good look around him, and the dim light would put most people on edge. Nervous people were often easier to interrogate.
The first thing he tried to do was stand up. This failed as Mystique had tied him to the chair using solid, sturdy rope, of a rough synthetic fiber that would bite into his flesh when he struggled; it also had the added benefits of being tough, strong, and resistant to burning. No ordinary human would be able to break it, and she'd ensured that he didn't have any weapons left. The handgun that he'd had in his jacket had been pitiful, he'd also had a good dagger, a multi-tool with two knife blades, and a wooden stake. She'd placed the whole pile, along with his watch and cellular phone, into a pile on a table across the room.
"Whaaa? Where 'm I an' how'd I get here?" The sedatives hadn't completely cleared his system, leaving him a bit groggy, his words slurred and lacking the crisp, condescending precision that he had used at the office building.
Letting her voice slip back to its natural doubled tones, Mystique could feel herself smiling as she answered, "Where is unimportant. Just think of this as the last place that you'll ever be. I brought you here so that we could have a nice, long conversation."
Quentin Travers began swearing and cursing in a variety of languages that included French, German, Russian, Greek, Latin and Chinese as well as at least four others that Mystique couldn't identify. Among the insults, she gathered that he thought he'd been abducted by some sort of demon.
The sheer scope and variety of the insults, curses and languages used was actually quite impressive. It wouldn't save him, but she was impressed. She was even flexible enough that some of the phrases were things that she could do, if she were so inclined.
"Creative. It appears that you have some skill as a linguist, Quentin. As impressive as your range of profanity is, you will still die. But feel free to shout, scream and curse all you want," she could feel herself smiling again as she finished, "Nobody will hear you except me."
"Why are you doing this? Tell me, you serpent-tongued snot-sucking demon!" Even as he made his arrogant demand, Quentin Travers was attempting to twist his hands enough to loosen the ropes. "Don't you know who I am?"
"You're Quentin Travers, son of Charles Quentin Travers and Mary Elaine Bonham-Travers. You're fifty three years old, pay your taxes to almost the amount due, and run an operation that's no more a historical society than I'm a Russian prima ballerina. I know exactly who you are," Mystique purred, not feeling the slightest bit of guilt over her exaggerated confidence. She knew enough to grab him, and the interrogation would tell her more. Everything that she saw told her that he was a petty, self-important man who enjoyed holding power over others, and was addicted to that feeling of control.
"As for why? Maybe I just felt like it. Nobody knows that you've been taken. Nobody will look for you," she moved around to where he might see her, or at least a shape moving in the darkness, perhaps the glint of her eyes. "Nobody will mourn your demise."
"You can't do this to me!"
She laughed, not surprised by his reaction. It was common for those who let power go to their heads to think that nobody would dare move against them. That there would never be consequences or punishment. Sometimes she had the pleasure of being the one that proved this idea wrong. "I already have you. If you answer my questions, then you live longer. If you try to lie, to escape, or even if you just start to bore me, I will make you hurt. When even that doesn't amuse me any longer, you die."
As the man stared at her in horror, Mystique chuckled. She had a long, colorful past with a variety of jobs, many of them illegal to varying degrees. Sometimes she'd done horrible things to survive, other times she'd done it for money. This was starting to feel like a favor for a friend… and like justice.
"Let's start with a simple question. Tell me the official purpose of the Council of Watchers. The version that you agreed to when you joined."
There would be questions about his Council. Questions about the girls they were watching, using as many names as she could so that when she asked about Faith, he wouldn't know that Faith was the whole purpose for Mystique grabbing him. She would ask questions about nursery rhymes and old wives tales and campfire stories. There would be questions about bank accounts and weapons and drugs, including that mysterious greenish one. Questions about the building, about his car, about his mother's health. Things that she really wanted to know, things that could be useful, and things to keep him off-balance.
This was going to be fun… at least, fun for Mystique.
end MD14: Her Colleague's Daughter's Tormentor