Chapter Four

 Still a bit of language in this one, but probably the safest chapter since the first. It's also the longest, because I did a bit of math and realized that I needed to up my word count per chapter if I didn't want to run out of chapters before I ran out of days.

Also, there's explanation! Exposition! I finally figured out what's going on, and decided to inform everyone!

The bus ride was largely uneventful. Stranger spent most of it getting steadily drunker off the bottle really very good Daniel's, and contemplating the job the makeover crew had done in a mirror at the back of the bus. He really didn't look at all the same. Instead of the normal aging hippie with stars for sideburns and a large nose, the man who stared back at him seemed dignified - respectable - small-nosed. And he had huge sideburns. Compared to his normal, kept short pattern, these things were chimney sweeps. A man could use a bushwhacker on those things and not see any difference.

He wasn't sure what kind of hair they'd used, but he was certain that it wasn't human - or at least not the kind of human he'd want to meet in a dark alley alone. Or ever. It stuck out a good five inches from his face, unbending. He almost suspected it to be copper filament rather than hair. They were impressive sideburns. They were scary sideburns. They were fucking majestic sideburns, in the same way that a thirty-point buck's rack was majestic. As he got steadily sloshed, a vague worry breezed through his alcohol-fuzzed brain - I hope they don't try to mount my head like one of Uncle Perce's trophies. I like my head.

Then, realizing that drunkenness and a charter bus did not mix, he went and found the ensuite toilet and informed it of his motionsickness for the next couple hours.

----

He must have passed out, or fallen asleep, sometime during his miserable battle with his inner ear, because the next thing he knew it was morning and he was laid out on a fold-down bed, covers neatly pulled over him. Someone who must have liked him had pulled the shades on the windows beside him, and it was mercifully, blessedly dark. He wanted to give them a hug.

His sideburns were still there, hanging off his cheeks, refusing to let him roll on his side lest he suddenly have lots of tiny piercings in the side of his face. He vaguely wondered how they were planning on removing them. He hoped it wasn't going to involve something caustic.

George and the ginger were sitting at a little table across the middle aisle from him, and this time both of them were focused on something. George's focus might have been a little more pointed than the ginger's steady progress reading something or other on a tablet, but that would be par for the course. He didn't like being turned down.

Stranger must have audibly shifted when he turned to look at them, because the ginger looked up and a professional smile crossed her face. "I'm to give you a few more details of the big picture, Mr. Stranger," she said. "Are you awake enough to be cognizant of them?"

"Ah... Could I have some coffee first?" he asked, pushing himself upright. "I'm barely cognizant of myself right now."

The ginger nodded to someone off to Stranger's right, and he glanced over to see Big and Burly doing something to a machine that looked only slightly less futuristic than George's phaser.

"My name is Fransesca MacAlleister," the ginger said, drawing his attention back from coffee beans and blinking lights. "Call me Agent MacAlleister." She held out a hand across the aisle. Stranger took and shook it. "Your life is unfortunately still AWOL, Mr. Stranger, but we're doing our absolute best to get it back for you. Your inheritance is somewhere safe, and we're arranging buyers for it as we speak. You will get the best possible price for it, and be able to go back and live a life of comfort after it's gone." That professional smile was still in place.

Stranger's head was unpleasantly tingly at the moment, and he wondered what had happened to give him such an odd hangover. It made him a bit snappish - although that honestly would have been likely anyway, considering the past twenty-four hours. "Agent MacAlleister, exactly why is my inheritance being sold off without my permission? Has any though been put into whether or not I might like to keep the only reminders I have of my dear old Uncle Perce?"

"It is being sold off because if it is not sold off, to the correct people who know the correct things, then it's possible there will be war," said Agent MacAlleister, the smile disappearing without a trace. "It will be sold off, correctly and properly, because you have no want nor need of it, and are simply trying to assert control over your life - which, as I told you, is currently AWOL. You have no life, Mr. Stranger, and therefore you have no control over it."

Stranger stared at her. He'd definitely suspected as such, but to hear someone so offical-seeming, with her little ear-bud and a tablet that he was sure wasn't available on the open market, actually tell him so, was a different matter altogether. "So I'm just a point that you won't let Sir SomethingCock get. Got it. Duly noted." He turned to Agent Big and Burly. "Is the coffee done yet?"

To his surprise, it was. Big and Burly handed a mug to him, filled to brimming with sweet, liquid ambrosia. Ignoring the scalding heat, he took a sip. Then privately acknowledged that being a pawn in some larger game might not be without coffee-based perks. It was difficult to resist adding some irish to it, however.

"Are you capable of understanding now?" MacAlleister asked, the professional smile back in place. Stranger nodded over his mug. George was also definitely listening in, his head tilted towards them and not even pretending to read War and Peace anymore. "Good. The story starts about sixty years ago.

"Back then, the sci-fi writers were only beginning to write about things we take for granted today. It was generally thought that computers would be huge, bulky things reading punch cards forever, while the most daring thinkers thought that they might one day be condensed to the size of a closet rather than a whole room. Better ways for storing information than the huge machines or fragile microfilm were constantly being sought, and one specific way that was considered extrememly promising was the process of shrinking down images and storing them in crystals. What better way to store information? All the exactness or microfilm, none of the bulky machiens that computers and microfilm required, and what's more, it had a greater capacity than either and was more or less indestructible." She looked at him expectantly. Stranger nodded, not having a clue where this was going.

"Well, some things are classified, and remain classified for a long, long time. But it is known that the military was experimenting with different kinds of information storage up until the realy advent of the computer in the eighties - what isn't mentioned is that they were working with crystals back at the same time they were inventing the nuclear bomb. We don't know the exact details of the discovery, because they remain classified to this day, but we've pieced together enough to know that one set of experiments, conducted in the Office of Scientific Research and Development, worked quite well. Unfortunately, the scientist working on it, one Percy Stranger, decided he'd had enough. The OSRD wasn't exactly a nice place; the way they treated the conscientious objectors who volunteered to be test patients would have gotten them sued into the ground today.

"So this Percy left the OSRD, and took his research with him. It was treason, of course, but he knewa bit of Swiss, for whatever reason, and went to the only neutral country left. Switzerland welcomed him, and he spent the remainder of the war, and indeed the next twenty years, ensconced in a private lab there, acquiring eccentric tastes and arcane knowledge. It was a good life, for him, for a while."

Stranger interrupted, then, finally, managing to get his thoughts into order enough to ask a question. "My Uncle Perce was a military scientist? He lived in Switzerland?"

"Yes. May I go on?" MacAlleister asked. Stranger nodded, then kicked at George, who wasn't so much paying attention to the agent anymore as paying attention to her bust. George ignored him quite cheerfully. "Of course, all good things come to an end, and so did Percy's run in Switzerland. Spies were everywhere back then - honestly, I'm sure the only reason there aren't verified stories of meetings where all the members were spies is because the people involved were too embarrassed to step up - and one of them heard about the things that Percy was doing. It doesn't matter what country this spy was from, because the only real difference between any organization doing the spying is how much it cost to get the information gathered. This one reported back, and one Sir Thomas Stomcock heard about it. Percy had, in the twenty years, garnered a highly deserved reputation. He could make crystals do things that scientists today are only just struggling to duplicate. Crystals were his thing, his joie de vivre, his passion. And like almost anything that a truly brilliant mind is passionate about, there was a way to turn it into a weapon.

"Percy had created a true super-conductor out of a very special crystal, so it was rumored. We don't know today how he did it, nor how even what the crystal's components might have been, because when Sir Thomas heard about it, he charged in without a second thought. Sir Thomas was a huge fan of the idea of electricity as a weapon. Everyone in the sixties, or at least the ones in the military, were for the idea of things to take out the Damned Russkies, or the Bloody Dogs, as the Russians called the Americans. And the idea of using science to do it was appealing. Being better both intellectually and physically - using the intellectual to enhance the physical - appealed enormously. So off Sir Thomas went to bribe, steal, or beg the knowledge of the superconductor from Percy. Percy did not appreciate it.

"Luckily, Percy had gained friends in the town near his lab, and he was alerted to Sir Thomas's arrival. When Sir Thomas got there, the entire lab was empty. No Percy, no assistants, no crystals, and most importantly, no notes. Nothing. There wasn't even a table or chair left in the building. Percy and company had cleared out. He had gotten out of the military once, and he wasn't going to get dragged back in, according to his journal."

"Wait, you found his journal, but no notes?" Stranger asked.

"His journal he kept completely separate from his work. And he catalogued them, too," MacAlleister said. "Nearly eighty straight years of journals, marked by the time they recorded, all kept nice and neat in filing cabinets. And not a word of what he actually studied, beyond occasional raptures about the sheer beauty of a perfectly formed crystal. Quite irritating for a person in search of a super-conductor. His actual notes, he burnt, as he recorded in the same journal. It's seems to be suggested that he preserved them somwhere, though. That's where his original research comes into play.

"He'd kept at the storage problem as well as the other research he'd conducted, and by the time he was interrupted by Sir Thomas, he'd made huge strides. Using a specific and unknown crystals, he'd manage to get storage to levels as high as sixteen thousand points per cubic millimeter. Highly impressive. What is theorized is that he stored his notes - all his notes - in crystals, perhaps multiple times, redundantly, and placed them in his collection, which he'd been starting even then. If such a thing happened - and we're sure it did - this means that the crystals could be anywhere in your inheritance, Mr. Stranger. The recipe for a perfect super-conductor could very well be in Missy the Marionette.

"Percy wandered quite a bit over the next several decades, so far as we can tell. He didn't bother keeping track of his exact wanderings in his journals, but it's estimated he traveled more than a million miles, all told, bouncing from one local to another. Quite impressive for a man who wouldn't see forty again. Or, as time went on, fifty, sixty, or seventy. He only stopped moving about twenty years ago, when Sir Thomas finally passed away. When an entire two years went by without an attack, he thought it safe enough to come back to his family, and with them, he happily spent the last two decades of his life, until Sir Thomas's son got sick of waiting for him to die and expedited the process with poison.

"Now, Sir Roger has taken up his father's methods, although not quite his father's reasoning. The person who patents a perfect superconductor has essentially just taken the entire world by the ballocks, and Sir Roger knows this. He would be a... less than pleasant dictator, shall we say? And dictator he would become, worse than all the oil barons of today or the steel magnates of yore.

"So the unnameables have stepped in to prevent this from happening."

Stranger sat for a moment, processing. Then, he said, slowly, "My dear old doddering Uncle Perce was a brilliant scientist, who invented something almost impossible, then spent half his life in the plot of a spy book, trying to protect the world from the repercussions of a supervillain getting his hands on the knowledge. And now that he's dead, I've inherited the spy novel, as well as an entire super secret spy organization who are trying to save the world, and to whom keeping me alive is, while preferred due to competative purposes, not necessary."

"Got it in one," said Big and Burly, who was leaning against the cabinets beside him. "Don't take it personally."

"I'm not," Stranger said. "I'm really not. I believe wholeheartedly that this is how you'd treat anyone who accidently inherited the next huge leap forward in technology." His voice, mostly controlled to that point, squeaked slightly on 'technology.'

"Good," MacAlleister said. "Then we'll get along just fine, now." She stood and walked back up towards the front of the bus, through a curtain that divided the bus in half with the finality of and iron curtain. George's eyes followed her, until Big and Burly walked by and dope-slapped him. Then his eyes just crossed.

Stranger leaned back and closed his eyes. Okay, he could deal with this. It was all good. However, he was definitely feeling a bit rebellious, deep down in his soul. His life was most certainly AWOL, and the thing about going AWOL was that it was gone without leave. So he was going to have to do somethign about that. He just didn't know what, yet.

George, rubbing the back of his head, crossed the aisle and sat next to him. Leaning in, he whispered, "You know the dragon bong you gave me?"

"UNfortunately, yes," Stranger said.

"I already shipped it off to my New York place. Do you think they'll care?"

"Probably. But I doubt they'll notice something missing."

"Well, here's the thing," George said, wetting his lips nervously. "There was some paper, rolled up inside it. And a chunk of crystal or something rattling around. I though it was just some junk that someone shoved in there as packaging, or maybe something that broke, but now I'm a bit more worried."

Stranger looked at him. "George, if you have an ounce of sense, you never mention this again," he said. "Ever."

A moment passed between the two of them, the communication of two people who've known each other since forever, have gotten pass-out drunk and stoned out of their minds together, to the point wherre they can just about read eachother's minds. Then, George nodded, one of his business smiles crossing his face. "We'll split it fifty-fifty," he said.

"Perfect," Stranger said. That's when the shooting started.

-----

He never found out exactly what law they'd broken, but evidently the bus was Bad News in about two million, nine hundred thousand and forty-three ways. Despite the relatively calm atmosphere in the back of the bus, the front had apparently been negotiating with the police for the past two hours. Then something had been said that led the police to believe they were terrorists (Stranger imagined hwo they would explain their actual purpose. "I'm sorry officer, but in fact we are an international organization of spies and muscle-for-hire, currently combating terrorists for the good of the world. Yes, this involves lots of super-secret weaponry and occasional hostages. Hey, why are you shooting?") and that triggered the Bruce Willis complex that is secretly embedded in nearly half of all law enforcement agents, and shooting had started. Then the bus accelerated to speeds that were mroe or less unholy, George and Stranger were thrown back against the cabinets at the foot of the bed, and they were in an official, honest to god car chase.

They weren't, of course, informed of any of this at the time, the agents being a bit preoccupied with the driving of the bus and radioing out to try and get the police to see their point of view, but they got the jist of it from the sudden shouting.

"This would be way cooler if this thing had windows," George said, from his position plastered against the cabinet. "And how is this thing going so fast? I mean, I'm feeling a couple G's, here, and it's a fucking bus."

"George. They have phasers. Do you not get that phasers are like a thousands steps down the line from where we think we are with technology? Getting a bus to go absurdly fast is nothing for people who've harnessed the power of lasers to kill people."

"Very true."

Then the pair of them fell silent once more, listening to the chaos happening in the front of the bus and hoping that it didn't mean they were about to die.

The thing no one tells you, Stranger reflected in hour three of the chase, is that even awesome things grow monotonous if you're not able to do anything about them. The bus had a seemingly unlimited supply of power - he suspected there was a little nuclear plant under the hood, rather than a conventional engine - and so they were still going. He and George had passed through the various stages of Insanely Dangerous Situation Emotion. They'd hit terror for their lives, excitement about what was happening, curiosity as to what was happening, and were finally at complete and utter boredom with what was happening. They'd gotten up and started looking through the cabinets at one point, and had found a pad of paper and some pens. Now they were on their fiftieth game of hangman, and were well on their way to just giving up and singing Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall until one of the agents threw them off the bus. At least it would be an exciting end.

The chatter had been getting louder for a while now, from the front of the bus, but they had ignored it more and more as the horus had ticked by. It felt almost more like someone had left a television on in the other room, and it was showing an edgy 24 style movie. But it was beginning to get on STranger's nerves a bit. It all sounded the same.

That is, it had sounded the same. As George added an arm to an unfortunate stick figure, telling him that no, there were no M's in the phrase (eight letters, three words, last word 'off'. Stranger suspected the phrase was 'I want off,' but wasn't going to guess just yet), Stranger heard MacAlleister say, almos matter-of-fact, "Fuck."

It was just enough warning to throw out a hand to brace himself before the bus tipped over.

----

He spent a while a hazy fog, not quite attached to his body. He was probably in shock, but it felt so comfortable, just floating on a cloud. But he did start coming around when he felt his cloud start undulating up and down, sending twinges through various sore spots. Opening his eyes seemed relatively safe, so he did. Hanging in the air above him were two slightly alarming things - a table, and George's worried face. Of the two, George was definitely the more alarming.

"The bus crashed," George told him. "Just fell over sideways. I think these things," he bobbed up and down, causing Stranger to do the same, "are airbags. Saved our lives, I'm guessing. I only regained consciousness about five minutes ago, I think."

"Is there anyone else here?" Stranger asked, attempting to sit up when there was nothing solid against which to brace himself. George gave him a hand up.

"No, and that's bugging me. I think it's definitely time to hotfoot it out of here." There was a bit of a struggle as the pair of them got relatively upright and located the emergency escape hatch - now conveniently perpendicular to the ground, due to its position on the roof.

"I object to your use of the word hotfoot," Stranger said, moonwalking his way over to the hatch, "But agree with the principle of the statement." Without MacAlleister or Big and Burly or any of the other minions running around, he definitely felt a bit exposed. And vaguely pissed off that they hadn't been rescued or arrested or whatever when the agents had been. While he hadn't even aspired to the status of chopped liver in their eyes, he'd hoped he was some other chopped organ - perhaps kidney? It was embarrassing to be left behind.

They grabbed the wheel to release the hatch, and gave it a hard tug. It spun free after a moment, and the door fell out with a hiss of air. It was deep night on the other side, that still, black time when it's so late that it's progressively becoming less early. There was no lights except that which was streaming from the bus, and even as Stranger was noticing that, the bus went dark. They were on the edge of a vast wheatfield, the only sign of human intervention being its exact regularity. Feeling like an alien whose ship has just landed, Stranger stepped out into a completely unfamiliar landscape. George followed, hesitantly, and they stood in country silence, a clear silence broken only by crickets chirping and the rustlings of small animals.

"Well," Stranger whispered, finally. "Which way should we go?"

"Follow the Dipping Gourd?" George said.

"Which one's that?"

"That one." A random star was pointed to.

"Got it." And they wandered off into the very early morning.