🚀 go-pugleaf

                       TEAM M.E.C.H.A. #47
                By Robotech_Master, Long-Distance
            With Some Dialogue Provided By Lord Sabre

         A Story of High Technology and the Waiting Game
             (Is that anything like the Dating Game?)

                      - DisContinuity Note -
 If you've been keeping up, you should be able to figure out when
                       this takes place...

    The meeting at the Old Church had broken up, and everyone was
free to do his own thing for the next couple of hours.  Mike,
Sarah, Link, Robert, and Dr. Science wandered back toward the
field a few blocks away where they'd parked the M.E.C.H.A. jet.
They didn't say much, Robert especially.  But it didn't take a
great detective to see that Robert was suffering.
    He should have stayed with her.  He knew that.  But there'd
been an emergency--how was he to know the emergency had been
faked?  And now two of their number and one of someone else's
were gone.  Kidnapped by Revolutionaries, and God only knew WHAT
they were going to do to them.
    All this waiting around was making Robert crazy.  He wanted
to do SOMETHING.  But what?
    They arrived at the landing site and Mike triggered the ramp
by remote control.  As they trooped up the ramp, Mike took Robert
aside at the last.  "Robert, I'm sorry about all of this.  You
know that we're going to do whatever it takes to get her back."
    Robert looked up.  "Are you?" he asked sullenly.  "You don't
know half of what I'm going through right now.  I should have
been there, protecting her!  If I'd been with her, she never
would have been taken!"
    "You don't know that," Mike said.  "From what I've heard,
they came in force.  For all you know, you'd have been taken
along with them."
    "Well, at least then we'd be together," Robert retorted.
    "Look, at least this way you can help save her," Mike said.
"And by the way, you're wrong.  I DO know half of what you're
going through.  I know ALL of it.  Dammit, they took my SISTER
too, remember?!"
    Robert started.  "That's right, Summer IS your sister."  He
looked stricken for a moment, then apologized.  "I'm sorry, Mike.
I guess I just didn't--"
    "It's all right, forget about it."  Mike set his jaw.  "Like
I said, we'll get them back."  Mike went on into the plane, and
Robert followed him.
    Once they were inside, everyone split up.  Mike went up to
the cockpit where Ray Sterling was sitting, keeping an eye on the
plane.  His feet were propped up on the dashboard, and he was
reading one of the Jack McKinney novels he'd picked up used.  "I
can't believe this!" he said.  "This is complete and utter
dreck!"
    "Which one is that?" Mike asked.
    "Number 18, END OF THE CIRCLE."
    "Oh, no wonder.  Everyone agrees that book is trash.  I think
it's probably because the authors were working without a script,
so they decided they could just do whatever with it."
    "Okay.  Anyway..."  Ray put the book down.  "What can I do
you for, boss?"
    "Just checking to make sure everything's all right."
    "We're a-okay up here.  What'd you find out at the meeting?"
    Mike gave him a brief explanation of what was going on, the
plan to send Radian and Figuremaster on an advance scouting
mission.  Ray listened, nodded a few times over the course of the
narrative.  "And then we're going in to take them out?"
    Mike nodded.  "That's the general idea, sooner or later."
    "Okay.  I'm gonna go make sure my fighter's prepped and ready
to go."  Ray got up, tossed the book behind the seat, and moved
past Mike to the door at the back of the flight deck.  Mike
followed, deciding he'd stop in at the lounge to see how the
others were getting on.
    Glancing in, he noticed the room was unoccupied but for two
people.  Sarah Conner and Robert.  Mike could tell Sarah had been
crying, but she seemed okay now--she and Robert were talking
together, and Sarah was even half-smiling.  Mike nodded to
himself.  There was no reason why not...they'd each lost their
loved one to the Revolution, albeit in different ways, and
Sarah's missing sister was also Robert's fiancee.  Mike backed
away and closed the door.  Best not to disturb them right now.
    As Mike was turning to go, he noticed one of the lights on
the Star Trek TOS-style wall intercom fixture (just one of many
little foibles that Mike had designed into the jet) was flashing.
It was the call-incoming light, and signified that a phone call
was being processed through the jet's voice-mail system.  Mike
punched a button with an audible SNAP! and a small screen lit up
with the caller's selections.
    "Hmm, he wants to talk to Sarah...it's Scholarman!"  And he
even answered the quiz correctly, no less, Mike thought.  If
Sarah knew of the success of her humorously-overcomplicated
voice-mail program right now, she'd be in stitches.  "I'd better
interrupt before it pages Sarah.  She needs her privacy right
now," he decided.
    "Scholarman?" Mike asked.
    "Yeah?  Yes!  Hello!" the voice on the other end said.
    Mike sighed with relief.  "Scholarman, this is Mike.  Thank
God you called back.  We're in the middle of a situation here."
    "Something with Adam, right?  Let me talk to Sarah."
    Mike tried to think of how to put this.  "We can't.  It has
nothing to do with Adam--we THINK--right now. There's a fanatic
anti-mage group called--"
    "The Industrial Revolution.  I know--they tried to wipe the
floor with me a couple of days ago."  Scholarman sounded tense.
Mike decided to startle him.
    "Yeah--Radian mentioned."
    Scholarman sounded anxious.  "Radian?  She's with you?  Let
me talk to her!"
    "She's not here right now--she's scoping out for the
Revolutionary Home Base with Figuremaster," Mike replied, leaning
against the wall next to the commpanel.
    "So you're with the Counter-Revolution?  Fantastic--where's
the brouhauhau?"
    Mike considered mentioning the Salem meeting-place, but the
meeting was already over anyway.  "We don't know--Radian thinks
it's in Bob City somewhere--something about a mind link"
    "All right, Mike.  So where's Sarah?  Why can't I talk with
her."
    Mike paused, trying to come up with a good way to put it.  At
last he gave up trying.  "They have Ariella and Summer.  And a
Teen Team mage named Deckmaster.  Sarah's...indisposed, right
now."  There was a long silence, prompting Mike to say,
"Scholarman?  I--they wouldn't have killed them, would they?"
    The answer was a cryptic, "Hang on.  Let me check."
    "What?  Check?  How could you--" Mike blurted.
    Then a new voice came on the line.  It was some guy named
Grayson, and he seemed to want to know what the weather out there
was like.  The situation seemed vaguely unreal to Mike--people
had been kidnapped, other people were drawing up plans of attack,
and he was making small talk with someone he didn't even know.
    Finally Scholarman took the phone back.  "Mike--they're
alive--well, Ariella and Shadebeam are.  I don't know about the
others.  I can track them."
    Mike's heart began to beat faster.  "You have to connect up
with us!" he said.  "We need to have an organized--"
    "We don't have time," Scholarman said.  "It can't be long
before Radian traces them anyhow.  Look--don't tell the other
Magi about me.  I'll go and do what I can, but you must have a
lot more powerful magi with you anyway. With any luck, I'll see
you there!"
    "No, wait!  I--" Mike began.  There was a click as Scholarman
hung up.  Mike sighed and punched the intercom off.  "Might as
well start making plans of attack..."


    Adam shook his head.  That Carol Hunter woman was damn weird.
So...cold, somehow.  Was that the way HE was behaving?  He hoped
not.  And that girl of hers--the one she'd brought back from
Seattle with some cock-and-bull story of reminding her of her
dead daughter...spooky.  She could kill...how?  Adam didn't know,
he didn't even know if it was true, but he damn sure didn't want
to find out.  Brrrr.  There was something strange, somehow wrong
with that story, but he didn't know what it was.  It bothered
him.
    Oh, well.  She'd be talking to Bulletproof now.  Maybe he
could straighten her out.  But Adam doubted it.
    Adam didn't much like Bulletproof, or Benedict either.  They
were too...well, he didn't know.  He constantly got the feeling
that he didn't belong, that he was an outcast.  But Adam could
take it.  He wasn't here for acceptance, anyway; he was here for
the chance at revenge against the magic-users, the people who
were responsible for the death of his mother.  Only...
    Only what? he asked himself.  You can't afford to have
reservations about something like this.  It's all or nothing,
bud, what's it gonna be?"
    The answer came back after only a microsecond's hesitation.
All, you know it.
    But still, that hesitation was there...

    Marie completed her final aerial sweep of the prison and
headed back in.  Her suit was responding unusually well, she'd
noticed.  Had Benedict done something else besides fixing the
vocal command circuits?  It certainly felt like it.  The controls
were reacting faster than ever before!  She whooped happily and
rocketed through a quick loop-de-loop before coming in for a
landing.
    What Marie didn't know was that her prison patrol had been
useful for someone other than herself and Benedict the Dalek.
From her meld with the suit, Summer had been recording everything
the sensor suites were picking up, getting a good idea of how the
prison was laid out.  She was pretty sure she could predict where
the prisoners were located, and was quite familiar with the
concentration of soldiers in and around various portions of the
complex.  Had she lips at the moment, she would have smiled.
This was almost too good to be true.
    But there had been some scary moments.  Summer had been
frightened almost out of her wits when Benedict had examined the
Tornado armor suit, with her hiding in it.  She'd been terrified
that somehow he'd be able to detect her, to tell that she was
there.  But somehow she apparently didn't stand out from the
other machinery and software.  She didn't know how, but she
wasn't about to look it in the mouth either.
    As Marie swept in for a touchdown at the makeshift landing
bay, she was met by Benedict.  "What is the stat-us?" he asked in
his mechanically metered voice.
    "Status...uh..."  What was that word?  Oh, yeah, that's it.
"...nominal, sir.  I didn't see--er, detect anyone or anything
suspicious."
    "Ex-cel-lent.  You may ad-journ to the ca-fe-ter-i-a."  The
pepper-shaker-shaped machine jerked to a start and trundled off,
almost as if, Marie reflected, there was actually someone inside
it pedalling a tricycle.
    Marie sighed and climbed out of the armor.  She looked around
for Spectrum.  Hmm, wonder where he was...probably in the
cafeteria.  She could meet him there.
    Five minutes after Marie had left the room, something began
to ooze out of the power armor that she had abandoned.  It was a
silvery slime, streaming from every crack and joint in the supine
armor.  After about thirty seconds, this slime congealed and
thrust upward, shaping itself into the form of a 15-year-old
redheaded girl.
    Summer looked around.  "Okay...now to rescue Ariella and
Deckmaster.  Then we'll just see what we will see."

    Adam was in the cafeteria when Bulletproof made his
announcement.  They were coming.  Maybe tonight, maybe the next
day.  His heart began to go into adrenalin-induced overdrive.  A
battle!  At last the fight was being taken to the enemy--or,
better yet, the enemy was bringing it to them!  Adam slapped his
fist into the palm of his hand.  It felt GOOD.
    As Adam walked out, he noticed Benedict accosting someone,
some guy identifying himself as Philip Howards.  Adam shivered.
Better him than me, he thought.  As he left the room, Marie
reminded him of the briefing coming up.  He nodded.  "I'll be
there."


    Dr. Odd Science had adjourned to his lab on board the Team
M.E.C.H.A. transport jet.  It was remarkably well-equipped for a
mobile lab--better equipped than many stationary labs, in fact.
It was the perfect place for him to mess around with inventions
and things.
    Dr. Science was feeling...well, not depressed, but definitely
disturbed.  As he pottered around with a computer simulation of
the autorepair nanites he was in the process of designing for the
team's mecha, most of his mind was elsewhere.  To wit, it was on
the upcoming battle versus the Industrial Revolution.  There were
heroes on both sides.  Each was willing to fight and apparently
die for his cause.  Yet it seemed to Odd that there was nothing
particularly heroic in either one.
    Odd had been enthralled by superhero stories as he was
growing up.  Heroes of the Second Great War, like Dreadnought,
the Golden Swashbuckler, John Bull, the Mystery Men.  He'd been
watching movies and reading books about them at the same time as
his cousins Weird and Pseudo had been pulling the wings off of
flies and dissecting small living animals to see what made them
tick.
    Those had been the days of the REAL heroes--it had been a
Golden Age, when all the heroes had been the whitest white and
all the villains the darkest black.  Odd Science had read all the
stories again and again back when he'd been so young and naive.
But as he'd grown up, he'd gradually learned that things tended
not to be black and white in the real world, at least for him
personally.  He tended toward the middle grey, the grey of
personal profit, with the lighter grey of preventing harm to
innocents in there somewhere.  Still, he felt that somehow some
things SHOULD be black and white, or at least as close to that as
grey gets.  And superheroes were one of those things.
    But here were many of the world's heroes, ready to fight each
other, ready to DIE, if necessary, for causes they believed in.
How could hero fight hero?  Would either side, COULD either side
really win a battle like this?  It seemed to Odd that it could be
only a Pyhrric victory at best.
    It would have been so much simpler, Odd thought, if he could
just choose a side, either one, and say "This side is right" or
"This side is wrong."  At least he'd know which one to cheer for.
But for him, things just weren't that easy.  He was a scientist.
He couldn't commit himself without knowing all the facts.  He
couldn't commit himself emotionally at all--no truly objective
individual could ever afford to.
    On the one hand, as a scientist Odd firmly believed in the
sanctity of all life.  He wasn't a religious man, but he felt
that every living thing had a purpose, whether it was to feed
something higher up on the food chain, to control the population
of something lower down, or something much more complicated.
Wantonly killing anything mucked up the works in some small way,
and killing a lot of things, like a species, had the potential to
screw the earth over seriously.  Could magic-users be considered
a species?
    But on the other hand, what WAS magic?  By the tenets of
normal science, such a thing could not exist.  Making changes to
matter required that energy be exerted, work be done, atoms be
diddled with.  To be able to change water into wine simply by
waving one's hands around and mumbling a few words just didn't
make sense!  It was counter to everything Dr. Odd Science stood
for!
    And yet he had seen magic in action--he'd even had Ariella
cast a few spells for him simply so that he could observe the
results and try to figure out just where the energy was coming
from and what was going on.  He couldn't, of course--it as as
though it just wasn't THERE.  And yet, he had to accept the
empirical evidence his senses provided--Ariella had caused
SOMETHING to happen.  The cognitive dissonance was mentally
deafening.
    And so magicians had this power--this power that was beyond
all attempts at explanation by rational science.  Who knew what
it was capable of?  By some accounts, it had nearly destroyed the
world just a few short months ago.  Was it wise to trust these
people with this incredible power?
    Dr. Odd Science half-smiled.  Regardless of what side he
might or might not espouse, he was dutybound to support Team
M.E.C.H.A., and he would.  His feelings would not get in the way
of the job he had to do.

    Mike sat in the command seat of his Bahamode mecha.  He
didn't know what else to do.  The world was going to Hell (TM) in
a handbasket and here he was in the middle of it.  In a short
time, he was going to be involved in a major battle against some
of the heaviest hitting heroes the world had to offer.  Ginsu
World Class.  Bulletproof.  Benedict.  Spandex Babe.  Unorthodox
Girl--
    "Lass!"
    Whatever.  Anyway, he didn't know for sure if he could handle
it.  He half-considered going back to the Old Church where he
knew several of the Counter-Revs would be waiting for news from
Radian and Figuremaster.  Maybe Superuser would be there, with an
encouraging word or two.  Maybe--but no.  Mike was sick and tired
of looking for someone to give him advice when he felt depressed.
He needed something else.
    He needed to find Adam and beat the living crap out of him.
    Somehow, he felt that things would go better if he and Adam
could have their little talk alone, before the battle.  But...he
couldn't just go.  He had an obligation to the others here.  He
would have to lend strength to their attack, so he would at least
have to wait around and find out when it was.
    But after that, he was taking Team M.E.C.H.A. in.  They would
dig in, prepare for the battle--and Mike would find Adam and have
it out with him.  Once and for all.
    Jaw set, lips pressed tightly together, Mike settled down to
wait.


    So THAT'S her game! Adam thought.  THAT'S what was wrong
about her!  Why didn't I tumble to this before?!  (Because you're
an idiot, his subconscious answered, but he ignored it.)
    Spandex Babe had just revealed that paranormal investigations
were the MIB's demesne, not the CIA's.  Adam had to admit, it
made sense--the CIA was largely concerned with screwing over
enemy nations by mining their harbors and the like, and had lost
a great deal of the power it had once wielded since the Bay of
Pigs fiasco.  Why should it be interested in the paranormal?
Now, the MIB on the other hand...
    Deep in introspection, Adam was jerked back to his senses by
Bulletproof's order to assemble a search party, and Benedict's
alarm at the alarms being deactivated.  Things were going on, and
they were all happening at once.  "When it rains it snows, I
wonder why," Adam muttered, running for his Cyclone armor.
Whoever or whatever this "Carol Hunter" character was, he didn't
have the time to think about it right now.  There were things to
be done, and Adam knew that there was undoubtedly trouble ahead.
    When the cricket balls started exploding all around them, he
was sure of it.


              WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?  (GEE, I WONDER...)

WHAT ABOUT SARAH AND ARIELLA?  WHAT ABOUT DECKMASTER?  WHAT ABOUT
                   SUMMER?  WILL THEY BE OKAY?

                            FIND OUT.

                            ONLY HERE.

                           - SUPERGUY -