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Once Dave gives them a location for their thief, Sylvia and John try to find a semi-private place where they can have a conversation with Strange's presumed victim.  "I called Donnie," she tells John.  "He'll meet us there."

"Okay."  John says.  He seems in better spirits than he was earlier in the day.  John is always subdued though.

Sylvia, as attentive to emotions as most people are to traffic signals, looks at him for a moment and then smiles.  "It won't always be like this," she says, out of the blue.  "We're traffic accidents--crunching bodies and twisting metal--totally out of control and driving with cut brake lines.  But we'll get older, and we'll see it was never all that important.  It's just, getting there is tough."

"I appreciate the effort, but it's not what you think.  I get this way after a big disaster.  It fades."  he says, "Perfectly normal."

"Uh-huh," Sylvia says, disbelieving.

She looks at her cell phone, where Dave sent the name and address of the victim's family.  It's a small, sound suburban house in a quiet neighborhood, and if this kid had lived ten miles east of where he does, he could have been their classmate.  "Is he in there?  Can you tell?"

John looks towards the house.  "Couple of adults, one male about our age, two girls, maybe eight and ten or so."  John looks at her.  "I always get depressed after some big disaster.  It's complicated."

"Do you know why?  Do you feel responsible?"  Sylvia's not sure John has any friends who ask him about how he feels and whether he's happy--at least, no friends with whom he doesn't have an overly complicated relationship.  Around John she feels like she can be the strong one, which is ironic.

Before John answers, his vision flicks upward, brows narrowing. Donnie shimmers into view, dropping the last four feet in a fading glimmer of golden glitter. "Sorry I'm late. I didn't want to bring Althea too close to the ground in such a suburban area."

Sylvia smiles.  She likes the glitter.  But since they're on the job, and she's having a semi-grown-up moment with John, she keeps her squealing shmoopiness to herself.  "Our target's home."  She points down the road toward the little house wrapped in the spiky, bare shrubbery of winter.

"Makes sense.  So, what do we do now?"  John asks

"We could be straight-up.  We could knock on the door and ask to talk to him.

"Or we could be complicated and sneaky.  Can you actually see him from here?"

"Complicated and sneaky is your forte. I can be invisible again if need be."

"Like I said, one boy about our age.  I'm not sure it's him, since I've never seen him."  John looks towards the house again.  "Looks like mom is in the kitchen, dad in the living room maybe, or den, and the two girls are probably in the dining room.  He's upstairs.  Probably his room."

"Complicated and sneaky gets us in trouble when we do it for stupid reasons," Sylvia says.  "And unless I can piggyback a signal on John, I can't read our victim from here.  Besides, his family came forward, right?  They filed suit against Strange?  We don't need to be all X-Files, do we?"


"Alone, then.  We could probably get in there to talk to him without his parents knowing.

"What do you guys think?  Do we freak his whole family out?  Or just him?"

"Talking to people isn't usually something I do."  John says.  "So I'm not the person to ask."

"Talking to them is so totally your thing, Syl. I will stay visible and close, since I don't in any way appear threatening, right?" He puffs out his (gradually reducing belly) and slumps in an appropriately nerd fashion.

Sylvia's smile at Donnie is amused, oh-so-amused, and she turns her attention to the door and the house and the kid upstairs even though she's wondering how this could possibly be at any less risk for going to hell than her encounter with Hamilton.

She marches down the street, goes up the front steps, and rings the bell.

It's only a minute before mom answers the door.  "Yes, may I help you?"

"Hi," Sylvia says, pulsing credibility and calm, "I'm Sylvia.  I go to a school where Huge Strange is our counselor.  Can my friends and I talk to Vincent?"

As unreasonable a request as it is, mom just smiles.  "He's up in his room."  she says.  And points the way.  Sylvia can feel the veil of the woman's self guidance being pushed slightly aside by her own powers.

Sylvia's gratified that it worked, and she can't resist an archly gloating glance at the boys.  Too bad Colin isn't here.  Then she could indulge in a little insufferable smugness.

She leads the way up the stairs to Vincent's room and knocks at his door, too.

The sound of heavy metal comes from inside Vincent's room.  Loud and shaking the door, but not the walls.  Sound proofing does wonders.  He yanks the door open, expecting an annoying little sister, "What!"  and is suddenly shocked to see strangers.

Sylvia smiles, trying not to look like a missionary for the Latter-Day Paranormals.  "Hi, Vincent.  I'm Sylvia."  She does the Vanna thing, trying to turn on the cuteness factor.  "This is Donnie, and John.  We wanted to talk to you about Hugo Strange."

Sylvia feels Vincent's attention become glued to her.  He's vaguely aware of the boys, "Sure."  he says, turning and moving back into the room.  He turns the music down some, "Close the door."  he says, taking a seat on a bean bag chair.  "Grab some space.  What about doctor freako."

"We heard about the lawsuit.  What happened to you?"

Vincent looks like he's not going to answer, then shrugs, "I had a problem.  I'm a kleptomaniac.  It's easy for me though, I got skills.  Anyway, my folks found out and made me go see Strange.  Well, it didn't seem to help.  In fact, all the behaviors that made them think I was doing shit I shouldn't have got worse.  The only thing was there wasn't new stuff in my room all the time like before.  And I didn't remember taking anything.  Well, they took me to a different doctor, and he said that someone had been using hypno-therapy.  Only, I didn't remember it, and Strange never got my folks permission.  So they sued him."

Sylvia tries to ignore the urge to check that her wallet is still in her bag.  "Did the second doctor undo what Strange did?"

"I guess.  My folks are being all tight lipped about it.  Something about the law suit and not wanting me to do something rash.  You know how folks get."

"You know how you said you got skills?  What do you mean, exactly?"

Vincent smiles and stands up slowly.  "Nothing up my sleeve."  He hands her a cold soda.  "Presto."

"You're fast."  John says.

Faster than you? Sylvia asks John.

Aloud, she thanks Vincent, eyes never wavering from his.  "I've got skills, too, which is sort of why we're here.  Strange is running his game at our school--a lot of schools, in fact--and we're trying to figure out what his master plan is.

"I read minds," she says, trying to make him understand without freaking him out.  "I can go into your head and figure out what he left there, maybe figure out what he's trying to do--if you let me."

Probably.  Is John's answer.

Vincent smiles and takes a step closer, his hand coming to Sylvia's waist.  "That sounds pretty kinky."  He looks at the guys, "You guys wanna wait in the hall?"

Donnie's attentive look seeps from his face, being slowly replaced with an angry stone glare. "I'd like you to take your hand off of my girlfriend now," he says through clenched jaw.

It's rather an improvement, from his usual explosive responses. However, Vincent is getting his first (and possibly only) warning.

Vincent is Chinese.  He glances at Donnie, then back at Sylvia.  "Seriously?"  he asks, then steps back.  "Whatever.  So, do whatever it is you're looking to do."  he says to Sylvia.

Sylvia realizes she's cringing, waiting for bloodshed or some kind of emotional explosion.  When it doesn't come, she forces herself to relax.  "Okay.  This won't take a minute."  She pauses, then grabs his desk chair and a trash can--just in case massive puking should ensue.

She sits and goes to work.

Vincent Lo is a typical teenage boy.  With super speed.  He's taken iPods right off of tables in crowded lunch rooms.  He's untied bikini tops at the beach.  He's imagining Sylvia naked on his bed.  The parts he can't relilably imagine are covered with open porn mags.  The good pictures facing outwards.  As she swims around in the blotted memories of his treatments, and then the treatments to treat him for his treatments, she sees what hypnotism is like.  It's like pasting poster boards up over memories, the poster boards being images of memories as the hypnotist would like them perceived.  To Sylvia they look like a child drew them in crayon.  It appears that somewhere in the mix Strange left some instructions for Vincent to run headlong into a speeding car, at full speed, if he ever was to be connected to Strange.  The reason was, Strange had Vincent steal a variety of chemicals for him, and lab equipment.  One memory, covered over with a crayon drawing of girls at an arcade, is Vincent delivering some items to Stephen Hamilton.

Sylvia tenses.  She's run into this kind of thing so often that she's starting to think there may be a career in anti-mind-control treatment.

Guys, she tells John and Donnie, he might try to run--really, really fast--if I try to unpick this knot Strange left in his head.  You have to catch him, or he'll hurt himself.  Can one of you call Colin and let him know the other kids might be booby-trapped?  They should probably abort mission until we can catch up to them.

Donnie's eyebrows raise. Well, shit. Okay. You want me to make him much heavier? I can add about 200 lbs weight to him if you want me to. I don't have the full gravity spell, since I have the flight spell today, but I can do a minor version of it. He might not be able to move that much mass fast enough to avoid John catching him. I can do the spell and then go call Colin..

That sounds like it'll work.

"Vincent," Sylvia says, soothing him with a fresh wave of her Alicia special--calm and clarity, "I've found something.  A trigger, kind of like a bomb."

Oh, god.  A bomb.  That motherfucker.

"I need to defuse it.  If it goes off, you may feel a compulsion to run, and you might hurt yourself.  We don't want you to hurt yourself.  Do you understand?"

Sylvia finds she's interrupting his teen aged masturbatory fantasy as the majority of his focus in on her imagined self saying what she said from his bed.  "Sure, yeah, whatever."  he says. 

John just nods.  Ready.

Donnie raises his hands and makes several fluid gestures, glitter following his fingertips. The chair in which Vincent sits creeks ominously as his mass is suddenly increase by 200 lbs.

He then sits back and pulls out his cellphone to call Colin.

Sylvia begins her game of jackstraws, slow hand pulling apart the stabbing shards that make up this particular punji pit.  She's done this too often--far, far too often.  The process is beginning to feel familiar and comfortable.  She can see the pieces as they slide apart, and worse, she thinks she could put them back together if she had to.

In eerie serendipity, Sylvia's phone rings. It's from Alicia.

OOC: I agree; it works for the events to be concurrent. We can take it from here.

It rings for a while before someone answers the phone. When Colin finally speaks, his voice sounds distant.

"What's up, Donnie?"

"Not now," Sylvia sings when the Suspects' ringtone goes off.  She's got her hands full, figuratively speaking, with breaking Strange's trap.  "Donnie, can you get that?"

But he's on the phone with Colin.  Crap.  She'll have to let it ring.

"Dude, hold up on your investigations. Sylvia says Strange booby-trapped the students. She's untangling Vincent now, but the others might be set to do themselves harm if anything is revealed."

He reaches over to Sylvia's knit purse and rummages around with his free hand, looking for her phone.

OOC:

:laugh:

That's our group. A well-oiled, smoothly-working, highly-coordinated fighting machine.

:laugh:

"Oh, I thought Alicia already called you. Well, I'm glad you guys found out in time. We haven't been so lucky. Sarah had to whack Trent Davis to keep him from immolating himself and the Mall with him. We're fine, Alicia called the PCD, and now is probably stalking Strange. Sarah and I are at the hospital, I'm getting medicated for some burns."

Donnie squeezes his eyes shut and sighs. "Okay. You're alright though? Hold on, let me see who is calling Sylvia's phone."

He flips oven Sylvia's pretty pink Hello-Kitty edition phone. "Sylvia's phone, Donnie speaking."

Alicia's concern at the delay in answering shows in her voice. "Donnie? Jesucristo, you guys all right?"

Without waiting for a reply, she bullies on, breathlessly. "Strange booby-trapped the Trent kid's head and he almost went up in a fireball. We managed to shut him down, but not before Colin did his usual estupido hero-s**t and got his hands burned. They're both over at County General. Sylvia might need to come over and defuse the kid before he burns down the hospital."

"Hiya 'Licia. Yeah, Sylvia's defusing him as we speak. He was boobie trapped too. I have estupido on my phone and we are giving each other the rundown. I think we all need to be present for the lst one, later."

Alicia's response is eloquent. "Oh. Okay, fine. Don't mind me."

With a flat tone, she adds, "Has anyone given any thought as to what Strange will do once he finds out his subjects didn't self-destruct?"

"Hey, it's cool. I am not being a snot, it's just that I'm having two conversations at the same time, and Vincent didn't want to turn his music off, just down. I don't think Strange will know we've defused his patients unless he has others we don't know about spying on them."

"I wouldn't count on that," Alicia responds, her tone unchanged. "We left a rather nasty crater at the mall. It won't take too much effort for Dr. Cueball to add two and two and get 'cluster-f**k'.

"Besides, having Sylvia play 'Miss Fix-It' with their brains will probably mean the kids won't be any good as evidence. Which means we're back to not having anything we can use against the bastard."

"Sorry, but I'm not going to ask Sylvia to leave Dr. Strange's manipulations in place. That's as irresponsible as putting them there in the first place. If you have a better suggestion I am more than happy to pass it on to Sylvia. We can change up when we go meet tha last student. Instead of getting ourselves burnt or ruining possible evidence in their heads.." He shrugs towards John, as if asking his opinion too.

"Yeah," she concurs, mechanically. "Let her know she's got another one once she's done with Laughing Boy there. Gotta go. Places to go, people to meet." Click.

Asses to kick.

John shrugs, his attention on Sylvia and what she's doing in the event Vincent tries to run.

Sylvia calls it done when she's knocked the whole construct down.  She tests her work by saying, "We know Dr. Strange hypnotized you into stealing chemicals so that his colleague Mr. Hamilton could build a controlled mutagen."  She pauses, angry.  "We know, too, that he implanted Mr. Hamilton with a hypnotic trigger so that, if his work were ever exposed, he would kill himself to eliminate any evidence of a connection to Strange."

She looks at Donnie and John, trying to make sure they haven't missed the significance of that.

Donnie's eyebrows knit downward. "SonofaBITCH."

"Donnie, Sarah's weapon saps one's conscience for a while, and the PCD is already getting here. I'm sure they'll know what to do with Trent, so don't worry about that. I'll talk with Chris and let you guys know of further developments. Be careful. Chris you can hang up now." Colin says, to let Donnie pay attention to the more urgent matters he has at hand.

"No shit?"  Vincent says, then blinks a few times.  "So, what now?"

"You're good.  You're clean," Sylvia tells him.  "Except for the kleptomania."

"Cool."  Vincent says.  Then there is a strange pause as he looks around the room.  "So, you guys ah like detectives or something?"

"Vincent.  Dinner."  dad calls from downstairs.

"Ok, gotta go.  Dad hates it if we don't sit and let him bore us with his day."  Vincent shows the three out and then goes to have dinner with his family.

And this is the way it's supposed to go, Sylvia supposes.  They do their job, and the person they help goes on with his life as if nothing really happened and everything was always A-OK.  It's anticlimactic, but satisfying.

"So who's giving me a ride to the hospital?" she asks.

John points to Donnie.  "I need to check in at home.  Call me if you need me."  and he's gone in a blur.

Donnie bows and offers his hand, palm up, to Sylvia. There is a glittery pool of sparkles swirling aound his open palm.

"My dear Sylvia, would you care to dance?"

An impish smile is tugging up the corners of his mouth.

Sylvia smiles around the brewing anger over Strange's part in Hamilton's death.  "Fly me to the moon."

She places her hand in his and the gold slithers around her hand and sinks in. She is light as a feather, and Donnie pulls her close. They shoot straight up into the cold blue sky, and for a moment the wind is cuttingly cold. After three or four seconds heat begins radiating off of Donnie, and the wind seems not to affect her as much, even though they were climbing quite high.

A bugled greeting erupts from a cloud as Althea joyously says hello. "Sylvia! SylviaSylviaSylvia!"

Donnie floats them over to where Althea is doing wing-overs in happiness and waits until she gets her puppy-like excitement out of her system. "Sweetheart, we can't dawdle. Colin is in the hospital with burned hands."

Althea calms and Donnie deposits the two teenagers on her back. She speeds off towards the hospital, chattering nonstop at Sylvia.

Sylvia's in a correspondingly light mood as they head toward the hospital.  It was that bastard, Strange, who pushed Hamilton into killing himself, not her.  She's not sure that makes it any better, but she can't help but feel absolved.

She chatters back at Althea.  They're talking about the cupcakes Sylvia made with her mother last weekend.  Sylvia talks about the frosting and the little chocolate curls, and then she asks Donnie, as they approach the hospital, "Can dragons eat chocolate?  Does it give them liver failure, like dogs?"

"Doesn't bother Pip, but then again he's a little w-" Something vibrates between the two of them, and Donnie reaches down for his phone. After a nice grope at his girlfriend's backside, he flips it open, saying "It's Alicia.."


Donnie mutters something, then says louder "The cops are all over Strange's place. Someone tipped them off of some connection between him and Hamilton. Alicia and Sammy are headed over to check on Penelope.."

"That kid in the hospital is sedated and restrained?  Better get us to Penelope."