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The Morning of January 15, 2013 The Wonderbus roared through the skies of the Northern Hemisphere almost impossibly fast, the extra-dimensional construction of the craft shunting away the excess heat energy from its hypersonic flight enough to keep it undetectable in the air. They were flying thousands of miles, but the fantastic speed of their craft would get them there in less than an hour. Trying to keep his mind off the crisis of Erde-Tronik, the bioweapons, and the advanced plasma weapon that had nearly killed them all, Sharl had pulled up situation monitors from the computer inside the Bus, trying to keep track of what they'd left behind. "The good news is, the chaos seems to be limited to Freedom City, so it must be something there...I don't know, that bomb was extra-terrestrial, but I didn't recognize the maker. Maybe it's something with the Grue again." At least what they hoped to do with the Sanctum was easy enough. "I'll connect Erde-Tronik to the power supply there and keep it safe until Miss A and I can get it protected. As for the bioweapons, we can just drop them in one of the stasis fields there. It's not a long-term solution, but it'll last long enough for us to keep things safe. We-" A distant beeping interrupted Sharl. "That's the proximity alarm. Maybe there's somebody from the League there already." He tapped a few buttons on the bank of monitors they were all sitting around, the black and white screens looking as much like something from a 60s sci-fi TV show as the high-tech pieces of super-science they were. "I don't understand, there's something on top of..." The great grey vessel squatted over the Sanctum like an anteater scooping out ants, tentacles rising from its lower half scooping away huge chunks of ice even as they watched. The three eyes and slight horn at the rear echoed the face of the Gorgon, but Sharl knew that face well enough from his studies and his nightmares. He saw the details in an instant; the great digitizing towers driven into the icy Arctic landscape like tent spikes the size of buildings, the glowing red 'eyes' that bespoke an active subspace connection across the galaxy, and worst of all, much, much worse, were the smaller tentacles already buried in the exposed roof of the Centurion's Sanctum. His eyes wide with horror, Citizen managed to form the words: "It's the Curator."

Second Week of January 2012 Christmas and New Years were not a particularly meaningful holiday for Sharl, lacking a cultural understanding of the holiday and a chronological mindset that made the change between one year and the next relevant to his day-to-day life. It wasn't even like he'd gone onto a new grade at Claremont yet, something that made all this talk of school years seem terribly archaic. But things had gone pretty well for him; he'd gotten a house upgrade from Miss Americana that he was still customizing; the incredible, sinful luxury of another five rooms to himself, not to mention a simulated animal to tend to, was still something he was trying to wrap his mind around. Home and how different it was from Claremont had been on his mind lately: he'd managed a trip back home during the school holiday to visit his family in Tronik and to do some more superheroing in his home city, where the "mysterious Citizen" had gotten a chance to pull off some pretty impressive feats of derring-do, culminating in a spectacular rescue of a sinking exploratory ship on its way to visit the new set of islands Leroj had helped raise at the end of the previous month. No one on the outside had seen that, and maybe none of them would care, but he'd still felt good about it coming out. And that, he thought, had been that until Mr. Summers had summoned him and all of Young Freedom into his office the first day they were all back on campus after the Christmas break. Even with Mrs. Harcourt, by no means Sharl's favorite teacher, as their chaperone, Sharl was inordinately happy: they were going back to the Sanctum, the place that held his home, and with any luck his friends would be able to see it for themselves! With his usual laptop as his companion, Sharl put aside his house and went to work studying the school's files on the Sanctum again, heedless of the Arctic winter outside their jetplane window. After all, the Sanctum was one of the great repositories of super-tech on Earth, as well as the home of his home city: he'd better know something about it!