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Saturday, April 6th 11:32 AM Cannonade usually wouldn't have been in costume and about town this early on a Saturday. But he, like the rest of the Liberty League, had been on high alert the last few days. There'd been a number of suspicious thefts in the Freedom area over the last few days, and if the pattern held up, odds were the thieves weren't going to take a day off. Midnight had been the first to notice the pattern. On Thursday night, at around 3 AM, several items went missing from the Harcourt family vault at Eastern Seaboard Bank. They could tell the time because the disappearance of the items had set off the motion detectors and pressure sensitive plates in the vault - even though the thieves had not. There was no sign of breach, no sign of forced entry, and no sign of electronic subversion of the vault's countermeasures. Then, around midnight on Friday, someone had done a smash-and-grab on the Valert mansion in the North End and had stolen several antiques from the family's private collection. Two thefts that might, by themselves, be either coincidences or the sign of a particularly brave gang of robbers. But the Valerts had a reputation for considering private acquisitions the family hobby. Their collection was rumored to consist of pieces that might better belong in a national museum - bits of Greek architecture, Renaissance painting... and paraphernalia from the homes of Hitler's inner circle. Likewise, the Harcourts had a black sheep in their family tree - Roland Harcourt, who it was rumored had made a bank securing Nazi funds in American institutions. Some of which he might have actually kept. So it appeared that somebody was going about stealing Nazi assets - or, worst case scenario, relics. Which was why Cannonade was on patrol in Midtown, keeping his eyes locked on the Super Museum. Midnight had been able to narrow down a few "avenues of interest" for the robbers to strike at, potential assets that the thieves might strike at - private collections, arcane libraries, and so forth. The Museum was hosting another retrospective on the heroes of WWII, this time focusing on some of the artifacts belonging to the Reich's own superpowered operatives. There was little chance anything was going to go down in the light of day, but he'd volunteered to keep an eye on Downtown. And hey, nothing wrong with spending more time at the Super Museum. "Nothing big so far," he said into his communicator. "Anything on your ends?"

When the battle was done and the commandos defeated, Citizen floated out of the warehouse with his precious cargo tucked beneath one arm. "I've got it, guys!" He had both the truncated Erde-Tronik drive and the gold boxy storage medium from Earth-Prime in the same big black case. It would be up to he and Gina over the next few months, (probably as what would incidentally count as his graduation project) to integrate the Troniks together successfully but for now the backup was complete and the City of the Future (as he still sometimes thought of it, the very old motto that Tronik had kept even after the Exodus) was safe from the National Socialists. Assuming they got out there in time! "Wow!" He wasn't so focused as to not be impressed when he saw the battle with his own eyes; the smoking helicopters, the fleeing commando, the crack Nazi strike team that Young Freedom had taken apart with all of the skill and power of a master artist painting a portrait. "Nice, you guys," he said with a grin before disappearing into the Wonder Bus. "Now let me get the systems in here rebooted..." As the lights inside the Bus came back on, the other machines came out, Rogue in the lead in a humanoid body that looked like a human woman cast in the featureless nude, like something from a German Expressionist movie. With no explanation for the new shape, she cast her gaze from the scene of the battle to the heroes, back and forth, and for the first time seemed almost uncertain. "You did this. All of this, when you could have taken your Sharl and that city and..." She opened and closed mechanical hands before saying, decisively, "All right. All right, maybe you're right. Maybe there is another way to prosecute our war against the National Socialists." The group of robots behind her, which did not include her Sharl (who was in that system his counterpart was carrying) startled at that, but Rogue pressed on. "If you can fight the Nazis like this, teach them _fear_ without destroying them all, maybe we can try it ourselves. At least once, anyway. But you'd better take the Ragnorak with you. If we're not going to prune the humans back, it'll just look bad if we have it in our possession."

January 2013 Outside Heesterstadt (formerly Branson), Missouri It was raining when the Wonderbus arrived, a thick, icy-cold storm of freezing rain that would have surely been a blizzard had the weather been any warmer. Warm and insulated through the dimensional craft was, it wasn't hard to feel the chill outside. The bus had folded its way through space and time to come rumbling out onto a deserted stretch of concrete road by a grim, grey lake that might possibly have been more attractive in the spring. As it was, the whole world was grey and brown: the city across the lake, what was Branson on another world, was almost lost beneath the heavy fog which swaddled the area. Shifting his clothing over to the bland, servile pattern his counterpart had worn, Sharl peered through the front windows, just able to make out tall concrete towers and a massive, hovering flag projected against the clouds from the city below like a massive old-style holographic billboard. It was grim. "Everybody get changed," he said, calling back to the passenger compartment as he reached down to turn on the conventional gasoline engine. "The Tronik base is about five miles up this road! We're turning around..." He muttered a bad word in Lor, trying to remember how to work these stupid controls. With all the worries about fighting Nazis and transdimensional technology, maybe he hadn't paid enough attention to how to drive a stupid four-wheeled, rubber-tired bus! Why can't they just use antigravs like civilized people?

November 3, 2011 Somewhere in the Wharton State Forest Mark Lucas hated Nazis, which made it all the more awkward to be here in the middle of a growing crowd of them. His long-sleeved "Don't Tread On Me" T-shirt hid his lack of white supremacist tattoos, but his blonde hair cut very short let him look very much like an Aryan poster boy. This was not really reassuring to Mark, but this was the sort of thing you did when you took up the legacy of the greatest Nazi fighters in the world. He tried to remember his conversation with Cannonade that had brought them all there: Greta Ratner, aka the Aryan Angel, or as his UNISON file had described her "Britney Spears meets Eva Braun" was one of the most famous neo-Nazis in the country: there weren't many beautiful blonde eighteen-year-olds willing to shake their booty in the name of racial purity. But Greta had, through her own channels, approached Cannonade (the very face of skinhead superheroes) and asked for help: she was worried that her latest concert was going to be attacked by her many enemies, and that meant she needed a superhero to help. Of course it was a trap. You couldn't trust Nazis, even if they were hot blondes from the Midwest. Which meant instead of just one hero, the Liberty League was out in force! Even if Cannonade would be the only one the Nazis would be able to see in uniform. Hmming, sipping his Coke, Mark walked around the gathering crowd, looking for familiar faces.

September 12, 2011 Not long after their meeting in Paris, Edge made his own way to the Chateau Relais, following the plans laid down by Midnight and the more experienced heroes on the team. I guess I can't really call it Young Freedom; that belongs to the Claremont kids and anyway some of them aren't really that young! He'd hidden in plain sight as a UNISON employee on break, renting a car at the Bern airport and chatting volubly with the clerk there about how great it was to be in Switzerland and how much nicer it was than his usual African posting. From there, a car ride up to the mountains had taken him to the Chateau, where the last few weeks before the first real snow of the year had left the roads empty and quiet as he drove up and up towards the Chateau at an impressive 10,000 feet. Once there, he was all the cheerful, loud American tourist, buying a jaunty Tyrolean hat and parading around in it while he butchered German for the amusement of the locals, eating a huge breakfast in the chateau's impressive dining hall adorned with hunting trophies from all over the region. There were quite a few people there already, Japanese businessmen and quiet Swiss and Germans alike, and he let them see him without a trace of apparent artifice. The more of that that was in place, the better; who could be suspicious of that loud tourist in the silly hat? He kept a close eye out for his team, however, knowing that they'd find ways to contact him once they were all in place. Of course, with some of them, they'd be obvious even to him...

September 1, 2011 Jordan International Airport Freedom City International Terminal This is not why I joined UNISON thought Mark Lucas, keeping his annoyance off his face and a smile on it as he listened to his charge's complaints. "You have a UNISON escort because you're the daughter of a head of state of a UN-recognized nation," said Mark, feeling a little silly in his blue UNISON uniform. At least they hadn't made him wear the helmet on the plane. "and because Dr. Typhoon made the request personally." Princess Nina al-Darsah, the youngest daughter of Typhoon, the arch-nemesis of the Freedom League-turned-Middle-Eastern head of state, was about Mark's age. About to begin her first year as an FCU student, Nina was on her way back to Socotra for an urgent meeting with her father, who had requested not just a UNISON escort for his daughter but the most powerful agent in UNISON's employ. In fact, the man's exact words (as Mark had seen) had been "only the mightiest among your pitiful ranks is suitable to give security to the daughter of TYPHOON!" Pulled out of his camp on the Ivory Coast for this, Mark had spent the last day in the company of a gorgeous young woman with her father's tan skin, black hair, flashing eyes, and with the personality you'd expect from the daughter of one of the most absolute rulers on Earth. It hadn't been his favorite trip. "That's the third time I've made you tell me that, Agent Lucas," said al-Darsah with an amused smile as she folded her hands before her. They were sitting next to each other in the first-class cabin, Mark's uniform and her Socotran dress with its merger of Arab and Indian styles having gotten a lot of attention along the way. "You're very obedient. I was hoping an agent of the United Nations would have a little more gumption. But I suppose you'd have to be good at following orders to wear that uniform of yours." Oh, what the hell. If he was going to spend an entire transAtlantic flight next to this woman, the least Mark could do was try and make it interesting. What was the worst that could happen? "I'm good at all kinds of things, Princess," replied Mark with a warm smile as he turned on the charm. "And my job is to make sure you make it back to your father in one piece. And when we're done, if you'd like to see me out of uniform, I'd be happy to oblige you." He smiled, and actually got a blush from Nina, who'd evidently not expected that comeback. Out of high school and on his own, he'd only recently become aware of how good he was at flirting when he really put his mind to it. "In the meantime, though, the other passengers are arriving. Let's not give them any hint we're anything other than seatmates." They'd boarded the plane through a separate door for security, but since it was a regular commercial flight (Freedom City to Paris with a layover, and then to Socotra's big airport on the main island), the regular first class passengers were about to embark.