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Issue #5 by Hunter Lambright
April 2009 |
"LEGACY LOST - Part Five: Final Stretch"
For those of you just now joining us, you’ve missed a lot.
You see, in the 1940s, the United States government secretly kidnapped and cryogenically imprisoned its superheroes to be defrosted for missions in the decades to come. This program was masterminded by a man known only as Lieutenant Narfi. Sixty years after the initial imprisonment, Bill Bryon, the Young Avenger, was let out of his cell by the mysterious shadow that gave him his powers all those years ago. Bryon wanted to retrieve his file so that the Superhuman Deployment Division could never find and use him again. In the process, he also grabbed the Young Avengers file, which detailed the next generation of superheroes, thus endangering their lives.
Across the world, these powered teenagers were targeted by soldiers deployed with Narfi’s teleporting capabilities. They killed Rala Shurat, the Red Tigress, in Wakanda and crippled Michael Corson in Florida, but were set back when targeting Eli Bradley and Billy Kaplan in New York. In the process, Bryon tracked down Cassie Lang, kidnapping her for her own protection, and incurring the wrath of the Avengers.
Brought together by fate, these Young Avengers discovered that Narfi had taken Kate Bishop, the “Next Hawkeye,” hostage, and was threatening to kill her unless they stood down. The Young Avengers took off for the Superhuman Deployment Division under the shadow’s guidance, but all except Cassie were captured. The Avengers, with Michael in tow, were shot down on the way to the S.D.D. When the kids woke up, Narfi led in Kate Bishop, saying that he was going to follow through on his word before revealing his true intentions as the son of longtime Avengers foe LOKI…
# # # # #
The Superhuman Deployment Division
“Loki?” Eli asked in disbelief. “You’re the kid of a god?”
Narfi stood there with one hand on his hip and the other grasping Kate Bishop’s hair. “What’re you gonna do about it? Crucify me?” He laughed. “On second thought, we can crucify Kate instead. She’s a fitting Christ figure for our story, right? Just stick an arrow in each wrist and we’re good to go.”
“Screw you,” spat Kate, struggling against Narfi’s grasp even though every movement ripped at her scalp.
“Maybe another time, Kate,” Narfi said with a sick grin. “Although that won’t necessarily be a possibility in a minute. So, do you want it to be quick or painful? If my skills have improved, I can probably try to make it both. What do you say?”
“Why are you doing this?” Bryon asked, his head hanging low, as if he could not bring himself to look up at Narfi.
Narfi paused. “You really don’t understand it, do you? I mean, I get that you’ve missed out on world events for the past sixty years, which means you probably can’t point to Vietnam on a map or tell me what the Internet is, but you’ve already had contact with the Avengers! Surely you picked up on something, Bryon.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bryon said. There was defeat in his voice. “All I know is that you’re going to kill us all.”
“No, it’s not quite like that at all,” said Narfi. “My intention has never been to kill you at all. I only ever meant to bring you together, and if I may say so myself, I’ve done a damn fine job of it.”
There was a sudden crackle over the intercom, interrupting the exchange. “Lieutenant? We’ve got a forced entry on the west end of the facility. I’m sending a team to check it out.”
“Is it the Avengers?” asked Narfi, his tone going drastically from whimsical to dead serious.
“The bio-scan doesn’t recognize the bogie, so no, not one of the Avengers, sir. I’ll keep you updated,” said the man on the other end.
“That’s good, then. Thank you,” Narfi said, wiping his forehead. He turned back to the Young Avengers, his sickening smile set firmly back in place.
“Well, now, where were we?”
# # # # #
The West Entrance
Private Todd Emerson had no idea what he was getting himself into when he decided to go into covert operations as part of his military tour of duty. He had expected raids in the middle of the night and secret rescue operations overseas. Patrolling the corridors of a highly-illegal superhuman containment facility had not even been in the realm of Emerson’s imagination when he signed the nondisclosure documents.
It happened to be Emerson’s night at the west guard post when everything went wrong. He’d been hearing rumors through the night of intruders and aircraft being shot down, and all of this was hot on the heels of the whispers about an escaped prisoner a few nights before. So, when an unidentified person pushed open the west door with what sounded like quite a bit of effort, Emerson was almost relieved that something was actually happening to him on the job.
“Private Emerson reporting, sir. I’m closest to the bogie, and I’m going to try to get a visual lock on it. Over.”
Emerson crept out of his station toward the docking station at the end of the hallway, where the computer reported the breach. He held his gun at the ready, gave one last glance heavenward, and turned around the corner to face the vile intruder.
A battered, wheelchair-bound teenager moved slowly down the loading ramp. The chair limped along, one of its wheels bent out of shape and the other nearly shredded from the terrain. His sandy blond hair had been matted with grease and dirt from whatever occurrence had ditched him deep in the Adirondacks. One of his arms was covered in a thick, red glove.
In a cracked, dry voice, the boy whispered, “Help. Please.”
Emerson set his gun against the wall and ran over to the boy. “What happened? Are you okay? Is there anyone else out there?”
“Yeah, there is,” said the boy, his voice now unmarred. “You bastards shot them down.”
He reached out and grabbed Emerson by the arm with his gloved hand. At the boy’s touch, Emerson lost control of his limbs as electricity rippled through his body, sending his muscles into convulsive spasms. He collapsed to the ground, unconscious.
“Good riddance,” muttered Michael, struggling to push his wheelchair further into the facility. He and Stingray had been flying to the facility after receiving the coordinates from the Avengers when the Quinjet registered anti-aircraft missiles that had been fired at them. Stingray barely managed to get the planet to the ground in time. When the Quinjet finally settled into the ground, Michael had found Stingray unconscious. He was only able to get one of Stingray’s electrified gauntlets off before setting off in hopes of finding the facility and getting revenge on his own.
Michael continued to wheel himself painstakingly into the building, knowing that every turn of the wheel took him deeper into the lion’s den. That was when he realized that the lions were coming for him. They came in rows of three, their guns pointed directly at him. Michael realized with certainly that they would never get close enough for him to use Stingray’s gauntlet.
The men came to a halt ten feet away from Michael. One man, who couldn’t have been older than thirty, took point. “You are hereby under arrest for trespassing on government property and assaulting an officer of the military. You have the right to remain silent…”
Then, out of the shadows, hissed a voice. “Now.”
Out of the center of the squadron of men grew the shape of a girl that kept growing. In fact, it was hard for Michael to say that she grew, because the change was so sudden that it appeared to be a teleportation. He could only tell the difference as the men were thrown out of the way to make way for the girl’s sudden bulk as she filled the hallway. Her arms windmilled as she grew, sending the soldiers flying.
“Holy shit,” whispered Michael.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” whispered the voice he had heard earlier, this time coming from what felt like inches from his ear. Michael yelped and toppled out of the wheelchair.
Pushing himself up on one elbow, he stared up at the girl, who was forced to kneel in the cramped quarters. She was surrounded by the bowling pins she had made out of the men Michael had fancied as lions.
The shadows around Michael’s outstretched legs converged into a man-shaped form. “Michael, excuse the formalities, but meet Cassie. Prepare to swallow your pride.”
“Whether they know it or not, they pulled us out of hiding. We have to go!” Cassie said urgently. She scooped Michael up into her arms like a kitten, and Michael quickly realized what the shadow meant about swallowing his pride.
“Then we only have this one chance! We have to free the prisoners that the department is holding and hope that they help us rescue the rest of the Young Avengers!” shouted the shadow. “Take the first left you see, and then turn right at the second intersection, Cassie! It will be the door at the end of the hallway!”
Michael was jostled up and down in Cassie’s arms as she stumbled down the cramped hallway in her giant size. They reached the first intersection that the shadow mentioned before the alarms in the facility began blaring once more. “Move!”
They reached the double doors that led into the Freezer in good time. Cassie knelt down and set Michael on the floor. Then she shrank down so that she could fit into the doorway. Michael scooted himself backwards along the icy concrete into the room as Cassie crouched. The doors clanged shut behind them, leaving them alone in the cemetery silence of the soundproofed Freezer.
“What are we looking for?” Cassie finally asked after a long moment’s pause. Her breath ballooned in a white cloud in front of her face as she surveyed the room. It was filled with rows and rows of upright, man-sized capsules, but every last one of them was empty.
“No,” whispered the shadow, and, for the first time, it sounded defeated. “They must have known we were coming and moved them all to…somewhere else.”
“Then what do we do? How are we going to save Bryon, Billy, Eli, and Kate?” Cassie asked. Her resolve faltered for a moment.
The shadow flickered in and out of focus. “I don’t know,” it said.
“No,” said Michael. “We’re done with this defeatist bull crap, man. I wheeled myself out of a plane crash through the forest and I’m going to quit because the cavalry isn’t where it’s supposed to be? No way. We need to get in and do something. They took something from me, and I’m not leaving till I get what I came here for. What are we going to do? Go out and hope we can shake the Avengers awake before something awful happens? No way. It’s up to us.”
“How do you plan on doing this?” asked the shadow. “Your army consists of a girl whose greatest ability is to change size who is trying to fight in cramped quarters, a man who is a mere shadow of himself and cannot touch anyone, save to blind them, and you, a crippled boy with a stolen gauntlet who, might I add, is bleeding out onto the floor.”
Michael grimaced. He reached back under his shirt to where the stitches had popped in the chaos. “I didn’t say we had good odds, but man, how the heck am I going to be one of the so-called Young Avengers if I run the first time something needs avenging?”
Cassie looked at the shadow. “I’m with Michael. We came here to save Kate, but I won’t leave until we save them all.”
The shadow sighed. “Then what do you have planned, other than your impending suicide?”
Cassie cleared her throat. “I have an idea,” she said, “and it might just work without getting anyone killed.”
# # # # #
“I think he’s waking up. Walter? Can you hear me?”
Walter Newell came to with a groan and winced. His head felt like it had been through the ringer, as if he had played football without a helmet for hours and then topped it off with enough alcohol to give him the worst hangover of his life. As his vision swam in and out of focus, he muttered, “Ugh, what happened?”
“They shot us out of the sky, that’s what happened,” spat Quicksilver. Walter could recognize Pietro’s haughty tone of voice anywhere, even if he couldn’t quite see the blue-and-silver clad speedster.
“How did you guys make it out all right?” Walter asked. He popped his neck painfully. He could make out the forms of the Avengers. “I got pretty beat up myself.”
“Binary and Warbird caught a few of us, and Ant-Man grew fast enough to avoid the trees causing him any major harm. Espirita broke her arm, but it healed already, go figure,” said Pietro. “Need a hand?”
Before Walter could respond, Quicksilver sped around him, unsnapping the seatbelt and pulling some of the fallen debris out of the way. “Thanks,” said Walter, standing up. He looked down at his hands. “Where’s my other gauntlet?” Then he looked around. “Wait—where’s Michael?”
“He must have gone inside,” said Captain America. He pointed at the ragged wheelchair path that dug its way into the woods. “We took too long to get regrouped. He’s probably in there by now.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” asked Warbird. “Let’s go do some avenging.”
# # # # #
“I have a question,” Bryon said, staring up at Narfi.. “It wasn’t the shadow or chance, was it? It was you who set me free. If you wanted to orchestrate this grouping, that was something that couldn’t have happened by chance, is it?”
Narfi looked at Bryon with an almost pleased expression. “Good job. The pawn, for the first time, has acknowledged the grandmaster. The shadow took advantage of what he thought was an accident. He was as much a pawn here as all of you were.”
“So now that you have us together, what are you going to do? What are we supposed to do now that we’re together?” asked Eli. “Or have you even thought that far ahead yet?”
“Well, first I’m going to teach you a lesson,” Narfi said. “I’m going to kill Kate Bishop because you didn’t do what I told you to. So there’s step one. After that, well, there are plans. I saw this all, you see. Bit of a curse, actually, the visions. I saw that something was going to happen that you need to be together for, but there was no way you would be together unless you were brought together. And, unfortunately, it is something that affects even me. Funny how that works out, right?”
“You’re saying you did this because you prophesized that it needed to happen?” Eli asked incredulously. “You’re more deluded than I thought!”
“Actually, it explain things better than the explanation you’re running on right now,” Narfi said. “Some day in the future, you kids are going to save the world. It may be next week, or it may be in fifty years. I’m doing my part because, well, maybe now Loki will realize things have changed in his absence.”
“Your logic is…I don’t even have a word for it! It just doesn’t make sense,” Eli said. “You brought us together. Just fricking let us go already, man!”
“No can do, Little Boy Blue,” Narfi said. “Love the costume, by the way. But really, things don’t always work out like that, do they? Things never go the way they’re supposed to.”
With an explosive force, the door at the back of the room slammed open. “You’ve got that right!” shouted Cassie Lang, shoving her way into the room.
In the blink of an eye, as Narfi stood there momentarily stunned, he realized that he was no longer holding onto Kate Bishop by the hair, but rather, he was holding onto a handful of her hair. The other difference was that she was no longer kneeling, but was instead standing on one foot while kicking the other one straight up between his legs. “Son of a—!”
Kate didn’t wait for him to finish. She ran over to where Bryon, Billy, and Eli were being held prison. There was no time to be careful. She ripped the duct tape away from Billy’s mouth. “Get them free!” she said. “Let’s go!”
Michael crawled in near Cassie. “Can’t you get through?” he asked hurriedly.
“I’m stuck! I’ll have to shrink down to get in there!” she said.
“No! He’s recovering now!” Michael yelled. “Throw me, like a fastball special. I can stun him with the gauntlet. Otherwise he’ll teleport away like he’s teleported all his soldiers away!”
“What are you, the Young X-Men?” asked the shadow, and Michael could tell that the shadow would have rolled its eyes if it had any.
Cassie lifted Michael up and threw him gracelessly across the room. He landed on Lieutenant Narfi just as he was about to get up. “You!” Narfi shouted in surprise. “You’re not supposed to be here! You aren’t part of the plan!”
“Your plan can go to hell!” Michael shouted. He grabbed Narfi by the neck with his electrified gauntlet. Hundreds and hundreds of volts of electricity poured into the demigod’s body, causing it to spasm in shock.
Meanwhile, the room had filled with chanting. “Iwantustobefree… Iwantustobefree… Iwantustobefree…” Billy said, his eyes glowing with a turquoise aura. There was a bright flash, and suddenly he, Bryon, and Eli were no longer trapped by their chains.
“Come on! Let’s fight!” Bryon shouted. Soldiers had responded to the commotion and entered the room in pairs. Cassie continued to seal the main entrance with her bulk, although she felt several bullets hit her thighs and ricochet off Billy’s magical unstable molecule concoction. They were painful, but it was a necessary pain. It kept the fight from growing too one-sided.
Eli advanced on a soldier, knocking the man’s gun to the side. The man brought the barrel of the gun right back at Eli, sideswiping him on the face with it. He lowered the barrel, preparing to unload the gun into Eli’s face. Kate stepped in, knocked the barrel upward, and karate chopped the man in the gut. Then she flipped the gun upside down and swiped the man on the side of the head with the butt of his own rifle.
Eli’s eyes grew wide. “Man, am I glad you’re on our side,” he muttered.
Kate eyed him angrily. “If you ever try to save me again, I will kick your ass. I had it handled until you idiots showed up.”
“Sure you did,” Eli said angrily, his awe dissolving in the face of his own stubbornness. “That’s why he kept wanting to kill you, because you totally had the upper hand.”
“Let’s fight the bad guys, what do you guys say?” asked Billy, floating over in their direction. A bolt of blue lightning flew out of his hands at another soldier who entered the doorway, taking him to the ground. Kate and Eli grudgingly separated and took up positions on either side of the doorway.
Bryon knocked one soldier in the teeth and stepped away, tangling a second soldier in his cape before knocking him out as well. “There are more and more of them. How many soldiers does Narfi employ?”
“Too many,” said the shadow. “I would guess half of them are illusionary, created with Narfi’s powers.”
“Good call,” said Narfi, standing over them. The fighting ceased as the soldiers disappeared. “The Superhuman Deployment Division employs twelve full-time soldiers, and all of them were taken out before you all gained the upper hand. However, I think I gained it back.” His right hand gripped the back of Michael’s shirt, holding the unconscious boy upright. “Michael here is going to bleed out soon from ignoring his doctor’s orders. I have a pretty nice bargaining chip. What do you have?”
There was a blast of air as someone extremely fast entered the room. “Stop this nonsense,” said Quicksilver, noting that this was one of the few times in his life he had ever been late to the action. He held up a manila folder. “The shadow gave me the location of the folder with the information on the teenagers you have been attempting to assassinate. If I give this back, you’ll be the only one with this information. You won’t have to kill them any more.”
“You missed the part where I get these visions sometimes, Quicksilver,” Narfi sneered. “I know for a fact that you hit up every copy machine in New York City an hour ago to get that entire file copied in less than five minutes so that you could give me my file and still have the info. So yeah, I knew you would try this.”
Quicksilver cocked an eyebrow. He set the file down on the ground. Then, although he didn’t appear to move at all, Michael’s fallen form suddenly appeared in his arms. “Well, there went diplomacy,” Pietro muttered, then ran out the door with Michael’s body in tow.
“Narfi,” said a new voice. Captain America stepped into the room. The rest of the active Avengers roster filed in behind him. “It’s over. Don’t you think you’ve tortured these children enough?”
Narfi rubbed his chin as he stared up and down the line of Avengers. “For now, I suppose,” he said. Then, in a flash of light, he disappeared.
# # # # #
Avengers Mansion
“Michael has been stabilized,” confirmed Espirita, as she stepped into the conference room and sat down with the rest of the Avengers.
“Good,” said Captain America. He looked across the table at the assembled Young Avengers. “There’s something we still have to address, though. We have to figure out what’s going to happen with you all now.”
“I thought they would all go back to their normal lives,” said Stingray. His jaw shifted to the side under his mask.
“All due respect, Mr. Stingray, but in case you hadn’t realized it, I exploded my house, Michael got shot, Eli’s grandparents’ house was imploded, Kate was kidnapped—and so was Cassie, actually, and Bryon, well, he doesn’t exactly have a normal life now,” said Billy. “So there’s not exactly a good way for us to do that, sir.”
Scott Lang cleared his throat. “I’ve actually been thinking about it, and, with the Avengers’ approval, I’d like to take these kids under my wing to see what we can do about making them better able to defend themselves and, hopefully, the world at large in the future.”
“That’s actually not a bad idea,” said Carol. “You kids know that the world out there isn’t pretty anymore. You’ve done a lot of growing up in the past twenty-four hours. If you’re going to be out there anyway, I think this is a great way to do it.”
“There are some details we would have to work out, though,” said Captain America. “Would they still go to school, would they operate out of Avengers Mansion? There are a lot of small things we’d have to get worked out, the least of which is parental permission.”
“I think they’ve been through enough for one day without having to worry about how to convince their parents to let them join a super-hero club,” said Carol. “If Scott says he wants to handle it, I say that’s good enough for me for now.”
“Good,” said Eli. “It’s settled, then.”
“So what are going to call ourselves?” asked Billy. “I heard the New Warriors disbanded. We could use their name.”
“Why not just go with the name on the file?” suggested the shadow.
“The Young Avengers,” said Bryon, testing it out. He smiled. “Yeah. That’s good enough for me.”
# # # # #
The Superhuman Deployment Division
Narfi stood in the quiet emptiness of the Freezer. The team that had come together wasn’t the same team that was in his vision. There was time, of course, for their roster to change, but Narfi wondered just how many of the strings he would have to pull for himself.
He looked at the frozen blood that was smeared where Michael had come into the Freezer. He was the anomaly. He was the one who should have died but hadn’t.
Narfi bit down on his tongue in anger. If fate wouldn’t fix things, he would.
At a split-second’s thought, Narfi materialized in his weapons facility in Spain. The assembly lines whirred with the production of various machine and missile types. “There’s been a change of plans,” he said, looking at his top engineer. “We have to begin earlier than I expected. Begin putting the Iron Manacle into production.”
# # # # #
Central Park
“So,” said Bryon, sitting down on the park bench. “You wanted to see me, Mr. Rogers?”
It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood. The park was full of people out enjoying their day. They were walking their dogs, jogging, and having a good time, completely ignorant of the dirty secrets that had been lost in the folds of the great, annoying accordion that was their government.
“Please, Bryon. Call me Steve,” said Captain America. They were both out of costume, although it was Bryon who looked most out of place in this picture. It was a sure sign of the difference in how long each of them had spent in the modern era. Steve had been given some time to adapt. Bryon was still learning. “I just thought it might be good to talk to you. After all, I know a thing or two about what it’s like to wake up out of the ice and have the entire world change around you.”
“It’s a lot to take in,” Bryon admitted, fiddling with the string on his sweatshirt. “I mean, Alaska is one of the United States? We went to war with Vietnam? We no longer fight for justice, but for oil?” He shook his head. “I don’t know how you do it.”
Steve narrowed his eyebrows. “I’m not sure what you mean, Bryon.”
Bryon grimaced. “You wear the stars and stripes of America, but America has changed so much since you first took up that guise. It’s no longer a country to be proud of, but a country full of greed-swollen swine whose daily efforts are more likely to include not getting caught sleeping with another woman instead of trying to be a good neighbor. It’s something that’s bothered me ever since I woke up, and it makes me sick every time I think about it.”
“I hate to tell you this, Bryon, but that’s a feeling that doesn’t go away,” Steve replied. “But then, you have to decide who you’re fighting for. Who are you protecting? When the Avengers fight off an alien invasion or Ultron or whoever, they aren’t doing it so that politicians can remain in their seats and criminals can stay in their comfortable jail cells. They do it for another reason entirely.”
“Oh, what is that?” Bryon asked skeptically.
“We do it because we know that for every person who doesn’t deserve protection, there is at least one more that does. For every villain sitting in the Vault, there are three or four fledgling heroes trying to make a difference in the world. For every corrupt politician, there is one who is campaigning for all instead of the few. And, most importantly, for every thug and criminal on the street, there is someone like you or Billy or Eli or the rest of you kids trying to put them away and inspire hope,” Steve said. “We call ourselves the Avengers because we hope that maybe with our legacy, we can avenge the injustice of the past.”
“And what if we fail?” Bryon asked, shouldering the responsibility to the generation he was prepared to fully embrace as his own.
Steve chuckled. “You kids are some of the most stubborn, duty-driven teenagers I have ever met in my life. Believe me, you won’t fail.”
“Thanks, Cap,” said Bryon, getting up to go. “I mean it. Your faith in us, it means a lot. Maybe the dream isn’t dead after all.” Then, without another word, he turned around and walked off into the concrete jungle that surrounded Central Park.
# # # # #
“That looked like it went well,” said Carol Danvers, taking out her earphones and shutting off her iPod. “How’s he adjusting?”
Steve looked up and smiled. “He’ll make it. He’s a tough kid, reminds me of…” He trailed off.
“Reminds you of who?” Carol asked knowingly.
“Myself,” Steve lied, looking down at the sidewalk.
“You were going to say he reminds you of Bucky, weren’t you?” Carol asked, taking a seat on the bench next to him. Steve said nothing. “You’ve got to stop beating yourself up over that, Steve. I know the scars from old wounds when I see them.”
“I just don’t want to screw up again, Carol,” said Steve, shaking his head. “I’m just so worried that we’re going to get these kids killed by bringing them into the game this early. It’s happened before.”
Carol smiled. “I don’t know if it’s God or fate or whoever the little scientology alien god is, but whoever it is just gave you another chance, Steve. Maybe now is a good time to just take it and stop worrying about what’s going to happen. You’ve been deal a fresh hand, so put on your poker face and start letting yourself win for once.”
A moment passed where nothing was said. Then Steve looked up at Carol and returned her smile. “You know, I used to think that leaving a legacy meant having others follow a path and making sure everyone remembered your ideals. Now that my legacy is here, though, well, maybe it’s about something else, too.”
“And what’s that?” Carol asked.
Steve shrugged. “Redemption, optimism, and maybe a handful of vigor and courage. Really, that’s what the Avengers are all about anyway. It’s a recipe for heroism.”
Carol squeezed Steve’s shoulder. “Look at those kids, then, Steve. If they’re going to be anything, it’s heroes.”
END
# # # # #
Author’s Note
Wow. That took a little longer than I expected, but it was well worth the wait because, well, I’m happy with how it turned out. Hopefully I wrapped things up well enough based on the dangling plotlines and the things you had questions about. If Narfi’s plan doesn’t make sense to you, don’t worry. It will. He’s going to be around for some time to come.
So what’s next? Well, continuity-wise, check out the 2009 Christmas Special for a story centered around the Young Avenger and the shadow at Christmas. Then swing back over here for the upcoming Young Avengers Annual, which will explain just who and what the shadow is, and what his agenda is. Then, before you catch your breath, hang around for my second arc on the series, tentatively titled “Street Drugs.” Hopefully it won’t be what you expected.
-Hunter Lambright (3/29/09)
You see, in the 1940s, the United States government secretly kidnapped and cryogenically imprisoned its superheroes to be defrosted for missions in the decades to come. This program was masterminded by a man known only as Lieutenant Narfi. Sixty years after the initial imprisonment, Bill Bryon, the Young Avenger, was let out of his cell by the mysterious shadow that gave him his powers all those years ago. Bryon wanted to retrieve his file so that the Superhuman Deployment Division could never find and use him again. In the process, he also grabbed the Young Avengers file, which detailed the next generation of superheroes, thus endangering their lives.
Across the world, these powered teenagers were targeted by soldiers deployed with Narfi’s teleporting capabilities. They killed Rala Shurat, the Red Tigress, in Wakanda and crippled Michael Corson in Florida, but were set back when targeting Eli Bradley and Billy Kaplan in New York. In the process, Bryon tracked down Cassie Lang, kidnapping her for her own protection, and incurring the wrath of the Avengers.
Brought together by fate, these Young Avengers discovered that Narfi had taken Kate Bishop, the “Next Hawkeye,” hostage, and was threatening to kill her unless they stood down. The Young Avengers took off for the Superhuman Deployment Division under the shadow’s guidance, but all except Cassie were captured. The Avengers, with Michael in tow, were shot down on the way to the S.D.D. When the kids woke up, Narfi led in Kate Bishop, saying that he was going to follow through on his word before revealing his true intentions as the son of longtime Avengers foe LOKI…
# # # # #
The Superhuman Deployment Division
“Loki?” Eli asked in disbelief. “You’re the kid of a god?”
Narfi stood there with one hand on his hip and the other grasping Kate Bishop’s hair. “What’re you gonna do about it? Crucify me?” He laughed. “On second thought, we can crucify Kate instead. She’s a fitting Christ figure for our story, right? Just stick an arrow in each wrist and we’re good to go.”
“Screw you,” spat Kate, struggling against Narfi’s grasp even though every movement ripped at her scalp.
“Maybe another time, Kate,” Narfi said with a sick grin. “Although that won’t necessarily be a possibility in a minute. So, do you want it to be quick or painful? If my skills have improved, I can probably try to make it both. What do you say?”
“Why are you doing this?” Bryon asked, his head hanging low, as if he could not bring himself to look up at Narfi.
Narfi paused. “You really don’t understand it, do you? I mean, I get that you’ve missed out on world events for the past sixty years, which means you probably can’t point to Vietnam on a map or tell me what the Internet is, but you’ve already had contact with the Avengers! Surely you picked up on something, Bryon.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bryon said. There was defeat in his voice. “All I know is that you’re going to kill us all.”
“No, it’s not quite like that at all,” said Narfi. “My intention has never been to kill you at all. I only ever meant to bring you together, and if I may say so myself, I’ve done a damn fine job of it.”
There was a sudden crackle over the intercom, interrupting the exchange. “Lieutenant? We’ve got a forced entry on the west end of the facility. I’m sending a team to check it out.”
“Is it the Avengers?” asked Narfi, his tone going drastically from whimsical to dead serious.
“The bio-scan doesn’t recognize the bogie, so no, not one of the Avengers, sir. I’ll keep you updated,” said the man on the other end.
“That’s good, then. Thank you,” Narfi said, wiping his forehead. He turned back to the Young Avengers, his sickening smile set firmly back in place.
“Well, now, where were we?”
# # # # #
The West Entrance
Private Todd Emerson had no idea what he was getting himself into when he decided to go into covert operations as part of his military tour of duty. He had expected raids in the middle of the night and secret rescue operations overseas. Patrolling the corridors of a highly-illegal superhuman containment facility had not even been in the realm of Emerson’s imagination when he signed the nondisclosure documents.
It happened to be Emerson’s night at the west guard post when everything went wrong. He’d been hearing rumors through the night of intruders and aircraft being shot down, and all of this was hot on the heels of the whispers about an escaped prisoner a few nights before. So, when an unidentified person pushed open the west door with what sounded like quite a bit of effort, Emerson was almost relieved that something was actually happening to him on the job.
“Private Emerson reporting, sir. I’m closest to the bogie, and I’m going to try to get a visual lock on it. Over.”
Emerson crept out of his station toward the docking station at the end of the hallway, where the computer reported the breach. He held his gun at the ready, gave one last glance heavenward, and turned around the corner to face the vile intruder.
A battered, wheelchair-bound teenager moved slowly down the loading ramp. The chair limped along, one of its wheels bent out of shape and the other nearly shredded from the terrain. His sandy blond hair had been matted with grease and dirt from whatever occurrence had ditched him deep in the Adirondacks. One of his arms was covered in a thick, red glove.
In a cracked, dry voice, the boy whispered, “Help. Please.”
Emerson set his gun against the wall and ran over to the boy. “What happened? Are you okay? Is there anyone else out there?”
“Yeah, there is,” said the boy, his voice now unmarred. “You bastards shot them down.”
He reached out and grabbed Emerson by the arm with his gloved hand. At the boy’s touch, Emerson lost control of his limbs as electricity rippled through his body, sending his muscles into convulsive spasms. He collapsed to the ground, unconscious.
“Good riddance,” muttered Michael, struggling to push his wheelchair further into the facility. He and Stingray had been flying to the facility after receiving the coordinates from the Avengers when the Quinjet registered anti-aircraft missiles that had been fired at them. Stingray barely managed to get the planet to the ground in time. When the Quinjet finally settled into the ground, Michael had found Stingray unconscious. He was only able to get one of Stingray’s electrified gauntlets off before setting off in hopes of finding the facility and getting revenge on his own.
Michael continued to wheel himself painstakingly into the building, knowing that every turn of the wheel took him deeper into the lion’s den. That was when he realized that the lions were coming for him. They came in rows of three, their guns pointed directly at him. Michael realized with certainly that they would never get close enough for him to use Stingray’s gauntlet.
The men came to a halt ten feet away from Michael. One man, who couldn’t have been older than thirty, took point. “You are hereby under arrest for trespassing on government property and assaulting an officer of the military. You have the right to remain silent…”
Then, out of the shadows, hissed a voice. “Now.”
Out of the center of the squadron of men grew the shape of a girl that kept growing. In fact, it was hard for Michael to say that she grew, because the change was so sudden that it appeared to be a teleportation. He could only tell the difference as the men were thrown out of the way to make way for the girl’s sudden bulk as she filled the hallway. Her arms windmilled as she grew, sending the soldiers flying.
“Holy shit,” whispered Michael.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” whispered the voice he had heard earlier, this time coming from what felt like inches from his ear. Michael yelped and toppled out of the wheelchair.
Pushing himself up on one elbow, he stared up at the girl, who was forced to kneel in the cramped quarters. She was surrounded by the bowling pins she had made out of the men Michael had fancied as lions.
The shadows around Michael’s outstretched legs converged into a man-shaped form. “Michael, excuse the formalities, but meet Cassie. Prepare to swallow your pride.”
“Whether they know it or not, they pulled us out of hiding. We have to go!” Cassie said urgently. She scooped Michael up into her arms like a kitten, and Michael quickly realized what the shadow meant about swallowing his pride.
“Then we only have this one chance! We have to free the prisoners that the department is holding and hope that they help us rescue the rest of the Young Avengers!” shouted the shadow. “Take the first left you see, and then turn right at the second intersection, Cassie! It will be the door at the end of the hallway!”
Michael was jostled up and down in Cassie’s arms as she stumbled down the cramped hallway in her giant size. They reached the first intersection that the shadow mentioned before the alarms in the facility began blaring once more. “Move!”
They reached the double doors that led into the Freezer in good time. Cassie knelt down and set Michael on the floor. Then she shrank down so that she could fit into the doorway. Michael scooted himself backwards along the icy concrete into the room as Cassie crouched. The doors clanged shut behind them, leaving them alone in the cemetery silence of the soundproofed Freezer.
“What are we looking for?” Cassie finally asked after a long moment’s pause. Her breath ballooned in a white cloud in front of her face as she surveyed the room. It was filled with rows and rows of upright, man-sized capsules, but every last one of them was empty.
“No,” whispered the shadow, and, for the first time, it sounded defeated. “They must have known we were coming and moved them all to…somewhere else.”
“Then what do we do? How are we going to save Bryon, Billy, Eli, and Kate?” Cassie asked. Her resolve faltered for a moment.
The shadow flickered in and out of focus. “I don’t know,” it said.
“No,” said Michael. “We’re done with this defeatist bull crap, man. I wheeled myself out of a plane crash through the forest and I’m going to quit because the cavalry isn’t where it’s supposed to be? No way. We need to get in and do something. They took something from me, and I’m not leaving till I get what I came here for. What are we going to do? Go out and hope we can shake the Avengers awake before something awful happens? No way. It’s up to us.”
“How do you plan on doing this?” asked the shadow. “Your army consists of a girl whose greatest ability is to change size who is trying to fight in cramped quarters, a man who is a mere shadow of himself and cannot touch anyone, save to blind them, and you, a crippled boy with a stolen gauntlet who, might I add, is bleeding out onto the floor.”
Michael grimaced. He reached back under his shirt to where the stitches had popped in the chaos. “I didn’t say we had good odds, but man, how the heck am I going to be one of the so-called Young Avengers if I run the first time something needs avenging?”
Cassie looked at the shadow. “I’m with Michael. We came here to save Kate, but I won’t leave until we save them all.”
The shadow sighed. “Then what do you have planned, other than your impending suicide?”
Cassie cleared her throat. “I have an idea,” she said, “and it might just work without getting anyone killed.”
# # # # #
“I think he’s waking up. Walter? Can you hear me?”
Walter Newell came to with a groan and winced. His head felt like it had been through the ringer, as if he had played football without a helmet for hours and then topped it off with enough alcohol to give him the worst hangover of his life. As his vision swam in and out of focus, he muttered, “Ugh, what happened?”
“They shot us out of the sky, that’s what happened,” spat Quicksilver. Walter could recognize Pietro’s haughty tone of voice anywhere, even if he couldn’t quite see the blue-and-silver clad speedster.
“How did you guys make it out all right?” Walter asked. He popped his neck painfully. He could make out the forms of the Avengers. “I got pretty beat up myself.”
“Binary and Warbird caught a few of us, and Ant-Man grew fast enough to avoid the trees causing him any major harm. Espirita broke her arm, but it healed already, go figure,” said Pietro. “Need a hand?”
Before Walter could respond, Quicksilver sped around him, unsnapping the seatbelt and pulling some of the fallen debris out of the way. “Thanks,” said Walter, standing up. He looked down at his hands. “Where’s my other gauntlet?” Then he looked around. “Wait—where’s Michael?”
“He must have gone inside,” said Captain America. He pointed at the ragged wheelchair path that dug its way into the woods. “We took too long to get regrouped. He’s probably in there by now.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” asked Warbird. “Let’s go do some avenging.”
# # # # #
“I have a question,” Bryon said, staring up at Narfi.. “It wasn’t the shadow or chance, was it? It was you who set me free. If you wanted to orchestrate this grouping, that was something that couldn’t have happened by chance, is it?”
Narfi looked at Bryon with an almost pleased expression. “Good job. The pawn, for the first time, has acknowledged the grandmaster. The shadow took advantage of what he thought was an accident. He was as much a pawn here as all of you were.”
“So now that you have us together, what are you going to do? What are we supposed to do now that we’re together?” asked Eli. “Or have you even thought that far ahead yet?”
“Well, first I’m going to teach you a lesson,” Narfi said. “I’m going to kill Kate Bishop because you didn’t do what I told you to. So there’s step one. After that, well, there are plans. I saw this all, you see. Bit of a curse, actually, the visions. I saw that something was going to happen that you need to be together for, but there was no way you would be together unless you were brought together. And, unfortunately, it is something that affects even me. Funny how that works out, right?”
“You’re saying you did this because you prophesized that it needed to happen?” Eli asked incredulously. “You’re more deluded than I thought!”
“Actually, it explain things better than the explanation you’re running on right now,” Narfi said. “Some day in the future, you kids are going to save the world. It may be next week, or it may be in fifty years. I’m doing my part because, well, maybe now Loki will realize things have changed in his absence.”
“Your logic is…I don’t even have a word for it! It just doesn’t make sense,” Eli said. “You brought us together. Just fricking let us go already, man!”
“No can do, Little Boy Blue,” Narfi said. “Love the costume, by the way. But really, things don’t always work out like that, do they? Things never go the way they’re supposed to.”
With an explosive force, the door at the back of the room slammed open. “You’ve got that right!” shouted Cassie Lang, shoving her way into the room.
In the blink of an eye, as Narfi stood there momentarily stunned, he realized that he was no longer holding onto Kate Bishop by the hair, but rather, he was holding onto a handful of her hair. The other difference was that she was no longer kneeling, but was instead standing on one foot while kicking the other one straight up between his legs. “Son of a—!”
Kate didn’t wait for him to finish. She ran over to where Bryon, Billy, and Eli were being held prison. There was no time to be careful. She ripped the duct tape away from Billy’s mouth. “Get them free!” she said. “Let’s go!”
Michael crawled in near Cassie. “Can’t you get through?” he asked hurriedly.
“I’m stuck! I’ll have to shrink down to get in there!” she said.
“No! He’s recovering now!” Michael yelled. “Throw me, like a fastball special. I can stun him with the gauntlet. Otherwise he’ll teleport away like he’s teleported all his soldiers away!”
“What are you, the Young X-Men?” asked the shadow, and Michael could tell that the shadow would have rolled its eyes if it had any.
Cassie lifted Michael up and threw him gracelessly across the room. He landed on Lieutenant Narfi just as he was about to get up. “You!” Narfi shouted in surprise. “You’re not supposed to be here! You aren’t part of the plan!”
“Your plan can go to hell!” Michael shouted. He grabbed Narfi by the neck with his electrified gauntlet. Hundreds and hundreds of volts of electricity poured into the demigod’s body, causing it to spasm in shock.
Meanwhile, the room had filled with chanting. “Iwantustobefree… Iwantustobefree… Iwantustobefree…” Billy said, his eyes glowing with a turquoise aura. There was a bright flash, and suddenly he, Bryon, and Eli were no longer trapped by their chains.
“Come on! Let’s fight!” Bryon shouted. Soldiers had responded to the commotion and entered the room in pairs. Cassie continued to seal the main entrance with her bulk, although she felt several bullets hit her thighs and ricochet off Billy’s magical unstable molecule concoction. They were painful, but it was a necessary pain. It kept the fight from growing too one-sided.
Eli advanced on a soldier, knocking the man’s gun to the side. The man brought the barrel of the gun right back at Eli, sideswiping him on the face with it. He lowered the barrel, preparing to unload the gun into Eli’s face. Kate stepped in, knocked the barrel upward, and karate chopped the man in the gut. Then she flipped the gun upside down and swiped the man on the side of the head with the butt of his own rifle.
Eli’s eyes grew wide. “Man, am I glad you’re on our side,” he muttered.
Kate eyed him angrily. “If you ever try to save me again, I will kick your ass. I had it handled until you idiots showed up.”
“Sure you did,” Eli said angrily, his awe dissolving in the face of his own stubbornness. “That’s why he kept wanting to kill you, because you totally had the upper hand.”
“Let’s fight the bad guys, what do you guys say?” asked Billy, floating over in their direction. A bolt of blue lightning flew out of his hands at another soldier who entered the doorway, taking him to the ground. Kate and Eli grudgingly separated and took up positions on either side of the doorway.
Bryon knocked one soldier in the teeth and stepped away, tangling a second soldier in his cape before knocking him out as well. “There are more and more of them. How many soldiers does Narfi employ?”
“Too many,” said the shadow. “I would guess half of them are illusionary, created with Narfi’s powers.”
“Good call,” said Narfi, standing over them. The fighting ceased as the soldiers disappeared. “The Superhuman Deployment Division employs twelve full-time soldiers, and all of them were taken out before you all gained the upper hand. However, I think I gained it back.” His right hand gripped the back of Michael’s shirt, holding the unconscious boy upright. “Michael here is going to bleed out soon from ignoring his doctor’s orders. I have a pretty nice bargaining chip. What do you have?”
There was a blast of air as someone extremely fast entered the room. “Stop this nonsense,” said Quicksilver, noting that this was one of the few times in his life he had ever been late to the action. He held up a manila folder. “The shadow gave me the location of the folder with the information on the teenagers you have been attempting to assassinate. If I give this back, you’ll be the only one with this information. You won’t have to kill them any more.”
“You missed the part where I get these visions sometimes, Quicksilver,” Narfi sneered. “I know for a fact that you hit up every copy machine in New York City an hour ago to get that entire file copied in less than five minutes so that you could give me my file and still have the info. So yeah, I knew you would try this.”
Quicksilver cocked an eyebrow. He set the file down on the ground. Then, although he didn’t appear to move at all, Michael’s fallen form suddenly appeared in his arms. “Well, there went diplomacy,” Pietro muttered, then ran out the door with Michael’s body in tow.
“Narfi,” said a new voice. Captain America stepped into the room. The rest of the active Avengers roster filed in behind him. “It’s over. Don’t you think you’ve tortured these children enough?”
Narfi rubbed his chin as he stared up and down the line of Avengers. “For now, I suppose,” he said. Then, in a flash of light, he disappeared.
# # # # #
Avengers Mansion
“Michael has been stabilized,” confirmed Espirita, as she stepped into the conference room and sat down with the rest of the Avengers.
“Good,” said Captain America. He looked across the table at the assembled Young Avengers. “There’s something we still have to address, though. We have to figure out what’s going to happen with you all now.”
“I thought they would all go back to their normal lives,” said Stingray. His jaw shifted to the side under his mask.
“All due respect, Mr. Stingray, but in case you hadn’t realized it, I exploded my house, Michael got shot, Eli’s grandparents’ house was imploded, Kate was kidnapped—and so was Cassie, actually, and Bryon, well, he doesn’t exactly have a normal life now,” said Billy. “So there’s not exactly a good way for us to do that, sir.”
Scott Lang cleared his throat. “I’ve actually been thinking about it, and, with the Avengers’ approval, I’d like to take these kids under my wing to see what we can do about making them better able to defend themselves and, hopefully, the world at large in the future.”
“That’s actually not a bad idea,” said Carol. “You kids know that the world out there isn’t pretty anymore. You’ve done a lot of growing up in the past twenty-four hours. If you’re going to be out there anyway, I think this is a great way to do it.”
“There are some details we would have to work out, though,” said Captain America. “Would they still go to school, would they operate out of Avengers Mansion? There are a lot of small things we’d have to get worked out, the least of which is parental permission.”
“I think they’ve been through enough for one day without having to worry about how to convince their parents to let them join a super-hero club,” said Carol. “If Scott says he wants to handle it, I say that’s good enough for me for now.”
“Good,” said Eli. “It’s settled, then.”
“So what are going to call ourselves?” asked Billy. “I heard the New Warriors disbanded. We could use their name.”
“Why not just go with the name on the file?” suggested the shadow.
“The Young Avengers,” said Bryon, testing it out. He smiled. “Yeah. That’s good enough for me.”
# # # # #
The Superhuman Deployment Division
Narfi stood in the quiet emptiness of the Freezer. The team that had come together wasn’t the same team that was in his vision. There was time, of course, for their roster to change, but Narfi wondered just how many of the strings he would have to pull for himself.
He looked at the frozen blood that was smeared where Michael had come into the Freezer. He was the anomaly. He was the one who should have died but hadn’t.
Narfi bit down on his tongue in anger. If fate wouldn’t fix things, he would.
At a split-second’s thought, Narfi materialized in his weapons facility in Spain. The assembly lines whirred with the production of various machine and missile types. “There’s been a change of plans,” he said, looking at his top engineer. “We have to begin earlier than I expected. Begin putting the Iron Manacle into production.”
# # # # #
Central Park
“So,” said Bryon, sitting down on the park bench. “You wanted to see me, Mr. Rogers?”
It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood. The park was full of people out enjoying their day. They were walking their dogs, jogging, and having a good time, completely ignorant of the dirty secrets that had been lost in the folds of the great, annoying accordion that was their government.
“Please, Bryon. Call me Steve,” said Captain America. They were both out of costume, although it was Bryon who looked most out of place in this picture. It was a sure sign of the difference in how long each of them had spent in the modern era. Steve had been given some time to adapt. Bryon was still learning. “I just thought it might be good to talk to you. After all, I know a thing or two about what it’s like to wake up out of the ice and have the entire world change around you.”
“It’s a lot to take in,” Bryon admitted, fiddling with the string on his sweatshirt. “I mean, Alaska is one of the United States? We went to war with Vietnam? We no longer fight for justice, but for oil?” He shook his head. “I don’t know how you do it.”
Steve narrowed his eyebrows. “I’m not sure what you mean, Bryon.”
Bryon grimaced. “You wear the stars and stripes of America, but America has changed so much since you first took up that guise. It’s no longer a country to be proud of, but a country full of greed-swollen swine whose daily efforts are more likely to include not getting caught sleeping with another woman instead of trying to be a good neighbor. It’s something that’s bothered me ever since I woke up, and it makes me sick every time I think about it.”
“I hate to tell you this, Bryon, but that’s a feeling that doesn’t go away,” Steve replied. “But then, you have to decide who you’re fighting for. Who are you protecting? When the Avengers fight off an alien invasion or Ultron or whoever, they aren’t doing it so that politicians can remain in their seats and criminals can stay in their comfortable jail cells. They do it for another reason entirely.”
“Oh, what is that?” Bryon asked skeptically.
“We do it because we know that for every person who doesn’t deserve protection, there is at least one more that does. For every villain sitting in the Vault, there are three or four fledgling heroes trying to make a difference in the world. For every corrupt politician, there is one who is campaigning for all instead of the few. And, most importantly, for every thug and criminal on the street, there is someone like you or Billy or Eli or the rest of you kids trying to put them away and inspire hope,” Steve said. “We call ourselves the Avengers because we hope that maybe with our legacy, we can avenge the injustice of the past.”
“And what if we fail?” Bryon asked, shouldering the responsibility to the generation he was prepared to fully embrace as his own.
Steve chuckled. “You kids are some of the most stubborn, duty-driven teenagers I have ever met in my life. Believe me, you won’t fail.”
“Thanks, Cap,” said Bryon, getting up to go. “I mean it. Your faith in us, it means a lot. Maybe the dream isn’t dead after all.” Then, without another word, he turned around and walked off into the concrete jungle that surrounded Central Park.
# # # # #
“That looked like it went well,” said Carol Danvers, taking out her earphones and shutting off her iPod. “How’s he adjusting?”
Steve looked up and smiled. “He’ll make it. He’s a tough kid, reminds me of…” He trailed off.
“Reminds you of who?” Carol asked knowingly.
“Myself,” Steve lied, looking down at the sidewalk.
“You were going to say he reminds you of Bucky, weren’t you?” Carol asked, taking a seat on the bench next to him. Steve said nothing. “You’ve got to stop beating yourself up over that, Steve. I know the scars from old wounds when I see them.”
“I just don’t want to screw up again, Carol,” said Steve, shaking his head. “I’m just so worried that we’re going to get these kids killed by bringing them into the game this early. It’s happened before.”
Carol smiled. “I don’t know if it’s God or fate or whoever the little scientology alien god is, but whoever it is just gave you another chance, Steve. Maybe now is a good time to just take it and stop worrying about what’s going to happen. You’ve been deal a fresh hand, so put on your poker face and start letting yourself win for once.”
A moment passed where nothing was said. Then Steve looked up at Carol and returned her smile. “You know, I used to think that leaving a legacy meant having others follow a path and making sure everyone remembered your ideals. Now that my legacy is here, though, well, maybe it’s about something else, too.”
“And what’s that?” Carol asked.
Steve shrugged. “Redemption, optimism, and maybe a handful of vigor and courage. Really, that’s what the Avengers are all about anyway. It’s a recipe for heroism.”
Carol squeezed Steve’s shoulder. “Look at those kids, then, Steve. If they’re going to be anything, it’s heroes.”
END
# # # # #
Author’s Note
Wow. That took a little longer than I expected, but it was well worth the wait because, well, I’m happy with how it turned out. Hopefully I wrapped things up well enough based on the dangling plotlines and the things you had questions about. If Narfi’s plan doesn’t make sense to you, don’t worry. It will. He’s going to be around for some time to come.
So what’s next? Well, continuity-wise, check out the 2009 Christmas Special for a story centered around the Young Avenger and the shadow at Christmas. Then swing back over here for the upcoming Young Avengers Annual, which will explain just who and what the shadow is, and what his agenda is. Then, before you catch your breath, hang around for my second arc on the series, tentatively titled “Street Drugs.” Hopefully it won’t be what you expected.
-Hunter Lambright (3/29/09)