ic Hotsy-Totsy Nazi (IC)

[Avenger Assembled]

The battered supervillain awoke with a start. Reb opened his eyes and looked around craftily, before seemed resigned to his fate as he focused on the group of young heroes above him. Dropping his head back to the dirt beneath his head, he said out loud, "Captain Theodore Eastland, United States Army, Serial Number 43044-A. And that's all I'm saying till I see my lawyer." His Southern-accented voice cracked with age despite his relatively youthful appearance, Eastland had evidently sung this song many times before.

"You...you shut up, you bastard!" spat Edge, looking quite incensed at the former hero turned most dastardly of villains. "You don't deserve that title or that number. What were you trying to do here, anyway, pick a fight with people even stupider than you are?" Come to think of it, it was strange that 'Johnny Reb' had attacked people who were putatively his allies in particular.

"Think what you want, liberal," sneered Reb. "They're probably the ones who killed that girl, anyway."

[Gizmo]

"Leave this to me," Midnight instructed as he stepped out from the shadows below the trailer like a dread specter seeping forth from some wretched underworld determined not to return from whence he came alone. His voice, just quiet enough that one was compulsively forced to strain to make out the words, grated like gravel being crushed against itself, echoing hollowly through his featureless black mask while red, luminescent eyes narrowed and focused on his target. Even then, it was only once the frightening figure made it all the way to Eastland and grabbed the front of the disgraced soldier's uniform about the neck to drag him along without breaking stride that the bigot's expression of defiance began to waver. Continuing until they were out of earshot of the other heroes, Midnight dumped their prisoner unceremoniously on the dirt, littered with discarded plastic cups, ticket stubs and cigarette butts, crouching slightly to meet the visibly shaken Reb's eyes. No one else would likely ever know the exact words spoken in the moments that followed, but it unsettlingly short order the craven racist made clear his readiness to spill his guts.

[Avenger Assembled]

Eastland got that look Midnight knew only too well, a man scared to death of the grim adventurer, and one not sure of how to escape from it. "Look, look, I said, I don't know anything about how...look, it was her idea! It was her idea!" erupted the frightened villain. "The bomb, the dead body, hitting Delmar, everything! Ever since White Knight got locked up for beating down those s...those Mooslims, she's taken over the whole damn organization!"

"...what dead body?" asked Edge from his nearby position, taking the easiest problem first.

"The body that was supposed to be in the trailer!" yelled Eastland. "Look, she said it was something that would solve all our problems, and when she got Hammer and Fucastrega on her side, the rest of us were outvoted. Stupid little tart and her plans! I wanted to bring Delmar in on it, but she said we have to prove we weren't loyal to any one faction anymore!"

As she worked under the trailer, looking for evidence, Wander suddenly heard a loud thump from inside the trailer itself, as if a large sack of potatoes had been dropped on the metal floor over her head. She'd found little enough below, save that the small bodyprint beneath the bomb's former location had no trail leading to it, as if someone had simply popped into being to place it there. In the distance, there came the sound of sirens.

[trollthumper]

"Called it, frame job," Cannonade said. "So she sold the whole thing on the idea of white nationalists without borders. Great. And by faking her own death, she gets to guide things from behind the scenes without getting her ass thrown in jail like her bed sheet wearing boss. Makes some sort of sense." He looked back to the trailer. "Course, that would depend on her actually leaving something for the set-up in the first place. Something tells me 'missing, presumed dead' wasn't gonna cut it for this." His brow furrowed as he heard the sirens and considered a possibility. "Unless we're being watched right now... and she had a backup plan for this, too."

[Electra]

The moment Wander heard the thud, she was out from under the trailer as though propelled by a spring. "Something's in the trailer," she called to the others, automatically pulling her bat as she went for the door. A breath of newfound caution told her to wait for the others, but it was lost in the deeply-ingrained instinct to go through a door first and protect her teammates. "Something big, might be a person." She knocked the flimsy door open with her hip and went in bat-first, ready to swing if circumstances called for it. It would've been a relief, really; Wander was much more comfortable with a fight than with a mystery.

[Gizmo]

Shoving the bound and kneeling Eastland face-first into the dirt almost as an afterthought, Midnight strode swiftly to follow Wander through the entrance to the trailer. Gesturing brusquely for the others to refrain from entering just yet, he moved cautiously forward, observing the metal room itself in a glance before narrowing his focus to the corpse sprawled so that it hung partway off of the bed.

There was no mistaking Greta Ratner, certainly, by her tasteless stage costume if nothing else. Judging by the timing of events, she'd simply been dumped there, set to leave physical evidence in the debris of the trailer. Something about that didn't sit right with the young detective, however; if the plan had been to kill Ratner all along, why bother teleporting her away in the first place? Double-cross? Missing something. Regardless, not making sure the bomb was still in place had been sloppy, and that gave them a chance to catch up.

The body's arms were bruised, injuries inflicted before death, signs of someone holding her down. The puncture wound in her torso and the telltale signs of cardiac arrest pointed to the cause of death: and injection of potassium chloride, straight into her heart. After the explosion, there would have been no evidence of any of it, even if someone had bothered to look. Cold and calculating. Pawns sacrificed on a chessboard. For all the legacy hero had despised Ratner and all she stood for, she'd been barely more than a child and no combatant. Whoever was pulling the strings had used her as a prop and attempted to leverage the reformed League as players in their sadistic farce.

Tightly leashed anger practically radiated off of Midnight in palpable waves as he stood again, but there would be time for that later. Quickly noting what he'd found to the others, he crossed his arms, inviting any addition observations.

[Electra]

Wander stared at the body a moment, her brow furrowing as she put her bat away. "I need gloves," she told Midnight, assuming correctly that the dark detective would have an extra pair on him. Slipping the black gloves over her hands, she crouched next to the bed and examined the body, manipulating the head and hands, pinching the skin, lifting the eyelids. Her face was a blank mask, a sign that whatever emotions she wanted to feel about this, she would feel later and in private. For now the body was just an object to be identified and examined, and it wasn't as though she hadn't seen plenty of corpses in her time.

After a few thoughtful moments, Wander leaned back on her heels and looked up at the others. "It's a fake," she said flatly. "A good likeness, but that's not the girl who put on the show just now. And this corpse has been on ice and defrosted. It's not fresh, definitely not twenty-minutes fresh." She pushed herself to her feet, stripped off the gloves in a violent gesture that betrayed the inner turmoil. "Still a murder scene, but not the one it's supposed to look like."

[trollthumper]

For a few brief moments, Cannonade had felt sick when he'd seen Ratner laid out on the bed - whatever she'd done in the past, she hadn't deserved this. But then he'd recalled Johnny Reb's mention of there being a body left behind, and felt cold dread at the idea that he was being played again. And when Wander confirmed that the body wasn't Ratner's, that dread gave way to fury.

"She had it all set up," he said. He was quieter than Midnight and Wander had seen him before; his voice was muted, and he wasn't taking his eyes off the corpse. The tranquility was enforced, however - he was clenching his fists so tight it was a wonder they didn't break, obviously trying to fight back the rage. "She had someone left behind to take the fall for her. No... she killed someone so she'd get to be a martyr. The body's close enough to her that after the blast, no one'd ask questions. Hell, wouldn't be surprised if she worked on the teeth to match her dental records."

Cannonade calmly turned and left the trailer. He didn't want to take out his anger there - odds were it was flimsy enough it might collapse entirely if he put his full brunt into it, and the crime scene needed to remain standing for the police.

[Gizmo]

Carefully retrieving Erin's discarded gloves, Midnight remained the consummate professional as he tucked them away and noted the discrepancies she'd pointed out. "Good catch," he murmured quietly enough that it didn't travel past the two of them before he strode to the trailer's door and caught Mark's attention. "Edge. Teleport the body to the Manor." Blatantly interfering with a crime scene with the police already on their way wasn't his first choice, but explanations could wait until further analysis had given them the complete picture. The young vigilante wasn't about to risk the twisted plan succeeding despite the lack of explosion.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Can do," promised Edge, and with a touch the body disappeared, flashing in an instant to the examination table that Midnight had pointed out to him on previous visits to the Manor for just such an eventuality. Trevor really was prepared for anything. Mark studied the place where the body had been for a moment, irrelevant flashes of EZO1 in his mind, before he turned to the others to talk. There was no use dwelling on what they couldn't change, right? "All right, I can handle talking to the police if you guys want to handle the investigative side of things," offered Edge. "You guys are all better at that than I am. I can pop over to the Manor afterwards, or to help interview the Klan guys if you think that's relevant?" He wasn't sure what to say here; as seriously as he took this, the others were all better suited to this situation than he was.

With everyone's assent, Mark hopped them over the Manor's underground fortifications, transporting them into the heart of the ancient stronghold of the Midnight legacy! This gave them access to the body and the medical equipment inside the manor for a deeper analysis, as well giving Midnight a chance to hook up his teleport tracer to a more powerful version of the same unit: the teleporter at the interrupted concert had popped from Wharton State Forest to an abandoned oil rig well off the coast of Freedom City, a place Trevor recognized as a former supervillain stronghold before a big Freedom League raid the year before had brought about a series of mass arrests. The property, far enough away that it was outside American territorial waters, was officially listed as abandoned.

[Gizmo]

Setting the blonde corpse atop the stainless steel slab in the Manor's sterile medical bay, Midnight stared silently down at it from behind red lenses for several beats. At her, the young man decided finally, unfastening his featureless mask and letting it hang about his neck as he made ready for a more thorough examination. While he was by no means a medical expert, his training in forensics had been comprehensive and combined with the superior equipment of his inherited base of operations he was soon able to deliver a number of shocking facts to the rest of the team.

His initial summation of cause of death proved to be correct, as did Erin's sharp observations of the discrepancies between the still form and the pop star who's performance they had endured earlier in the day. Both DNA comparison and fingerprint matching proved, however, that they were indeed looking at Greta Ratner; just not the same Greta Ratner. "Estimate sixteen years old," he told the others in a flat, carefully emotionless tone. "Signs of freezing suggest preservation rather than duplication." There was no need to state outright the obvious conclusion. They'd all been present when von Streitcher's alternate universal double had attacked Nina al-Darsah and had heard her father's warnings.

[trollthumper]

Cannonade had been trying to dig up some sort of info on Ratner's relatives. She'd come from a family of seven kids, so odds were there might have been someone close enough in age and appearance to make the swap. But there weren't many photos of Greta's happy little cult compound upbringing - just an interview with her parents by the local paper, asking how they felt about their daughter becoming the bastard offspring of Britney Spears and Leni Reifenstahl. There was nothing to be found on any of her siblings, though, and there were too many missing persons reports on young blonde teenage girls from the tri-state area to try and narrow it down in one night.

It wasn't until Midnight shared his information that the obvious hit. It was only now that Cannonade remembered the warnings of Typhoon and the missed rendezvous in Switzerland. "You've gotta be kidding me," he said. "Well, the whole martyrdom angle makes a hell of a lot more sense now. Gives the white nationalist crowd a chance to wave the bloody shirt while the other Greta directs 'em from behind the scenes. Get as many dupes as they can on their side."

[Electra]

"We need to get experts in to look at the body right away," Wander spoke up, sparing a single look of pity for the deceased young woman. "Better equipment and expertise might be able to tell us more about how long she was frozen, what kind of timeline we're working with. If this is Greta-Prime, the switch could've taken place years ago. If she's from somewhere else and they're using an old stored body, or if her timeline moves slower, it could be a whole different ball game."

She tapped her finger against her lips thoughtfully. "Daedelus and Dr. Atom could probably find out for us," she suggested. "Then we could check out the teleporter lead, and maybe they could smooth things out with the police, too. We're sort of short on manpower to be doing everything ourselves."

[Avenger Assembled]

"There's almost certainly more than one Erde," said Edge with a nod, the usually-cheerful hero looking decidedly displeased at the thought, but he'd taken the same interdimensional classes as the rest of the Claremont kids. "If Daedalus or Dr. Atom can tell us what dimension...uh, she's been in, they can tell us if we're dealing with Hope's timeline or if all this is some new threat entirely." He folded his arms. "It'll also free us to concentrate on finding her killer. Or killers." Erin was right about the lack of manpower, but of course there wasn't much they could do about that at the moment. As the most personable of the team, he took charge of delivering the body into the hands of Dr. Atom (since, unlike Daedalus, he was much more reliable when it came to actually being home, since he didn't have a lot of options these days.)

[trollthumper]

Cannonade couldn't say he liked the idea of "more than one Erde." On a philosophical level, it made sense; if you could say that every parallel version of this Earth relied on some deviation from how things had proceeded in history here, then it wasn't a stretch to say that Earth didn't spawn its own alternate timelines based on paths not taken. Still, the thought of a multitude of Earths where the Nazis were victorious - and all the carnage they might have wrought - didn't help.

"Might not be Erde," he said. "Whole lotta other ways to do it. Shapeshifter, illusionist, clone... could be that someone on this side decided they needed a martyr, and no one would miss Greta." He tried to hold down his gorge as he said it. Two parents, six siblings - they may have been racist idiots who kept themselves sheltered from the outside world so they'd only know hate, but they were still a family. And they'd just lost one of their own. "Then again, odds are this is an outside job. We just need to figure out what sorta presence they've got over here."

[Avenger Assembled]

Of course, before they could solve that problem, they had to trace the mysterious teleporter who had escaped them already that day. Once the body was in the capable hands of Dr. Atom, with Midnight providing the GPS coordinates, Edge's teleportation transported them to the abandoned oil rig where hopefully they would run their prey to ground! Midnight's teleport sensors tinged as soon as they arrived; not only was their prey from the fight at the concert here, but he or she hadn't gone very far. It was cold on the rig, the November winds rising off the sea chilly for those in the small group not accustomed to the weather. For half a moment, Mark remembered their battle in the future of that other timeline, working alongside the descendants of another Young Freedom to keep Omega from destroying the multiverse, but shook off that memory as they dealt with this new threat.

"All right, team," murmured Edge, his costume adopting light brown and grey with a thought to match the colors of the rig where they were working. "Let's fan out and see what we can see..." Despite Mark's words, there came from inside the rig, where the crew quarters had once been but was now a corridor into darkness, the hard, unmistakable sound of blows! Peering down the corridor, the sharp-eyed Midnight could see evidence of reconstruction, where the abandoned supervillain apartments had been refurbished for human occupation; the fight, if that was what it was, was close, behind just the front door of the nearest room inside the rig proper. They were on a naked catwalk where they were, shielded from the door but not from the elements outside.

[trollthumper]

Cannonade pulled his flight jacket up and raised the zipper slightly. The activation of his latent genetics had given him a much-enhanced constitution, but that didn't mean he couldn't feel the cold. He took in the surroundings - the Altantic stretching out before them, without much light, save that of the moon, to help illuminate the cold, empty expanse. "This job takes you to the nicest places," he said. "So, what do we do when we find her?"

His question was cut off by the sound of blows. "Okay, never mind that. What do we do now?"

[Electra]

"Somebody's in a fight," Wander commented, hefting her bat as she looked towards the door. "Maybe it's an enemy of our enemy, or maybe they're just smacking each other around, but either way, it could be a good distraction. We need to see what's inside there, so might as well go now." Bat at the ready, she headed for the door and pulled it open, interposing her body at the crack and looking in. When nothing immediately jumped out at her, she pulled it wider and stepped in, looking swiftly around for the source of the noise, as well as checking for exits, enemies, and potential ambush sites.

[Avenger Assembled]

It wasn't tough to find Aryan Angel, the rig-turned-super-villain stronghold turned derelict wasn't heavily populated. Just inside the first door that Wander threw open, they found the blonde songstress turned supervillain, Greta having changed out of her skimpy costume into a more comfortable (perhaps on many levels, if she was the fascist spy from another dimension they suspected she was) long-sleeved black shirt and jeans: and so did her minions, the half-dozen thugs in similar garb who were in the room with her. That also answered the question of who was doing the beating: the lead thug had just landed a solid punch to Greta Ratner's midsection, seemingly the last in a series of blows given the artistic bruising scattered across the young woman's cheeks.

The room was full of papers and material, maps of Freedom City posted on the walls, various city landmarks marked with spots, and a scattering of neo-Nazi paraphenalia everywhere. Gasping from the last punch, Greta managed to yell "Get them!" And sure enough, the half-a-dozen thugs in the room, each with the shaved heads and tattoos of neo-Nazis, actually did try and engage the members of the Liberty League in hand-to-hand combat, shouting white supremacist battlecrys of ultimate Aryan vengeance!

[Gizmo]

"Mop up," Midnight instructed his allies as he strode into the room with an almost disinterested attitude, oily mist roiling at his feet. For all the terse wording, it was less of an instruction than it was a clarification as to what he would be doing in the meantime. Easily evading the assorted thugs given how occupied they suddenly were with the League's powerhouses, he made his way to Ratner, drawing a matte black ziptie from his belt and holding it in plain view. "Retraining you first," he intoned, an imposing figure of black and sanguine pinpoints. "Then inspecting your injuries. Then getting answers." He didn't need to raise his voice, didn't need to make any threats. He was implacable and civil in equal measures despite his contempt for the blonde woman before him and it was in her best interests not to encourage him to be otherwise.

[Electra]

Trusting that Midnight had the situation well in hand, Wander turned her attention to the thugs. Luckily enough, there wasn't so much as a highly trained fighter among the bunch, much less a metahuman who might have posed an actual threat. With judicious wielding of her bat, Wander cleaned up the thugs her comrades didn't take down, then stepped to the door, blocking off the most apparent avenue of escape. Midnight or Edge would have to handle the teleportation issue, but she could stop Ratner from leaving on foot.

[trollthumper]

It was just like another Saturday night at a street punk show gone bad. Only difference was the setting.

"You."

Someone came at Cannonade with a steel pipe. He backhanded it out of the guy's grasp, the pipe twisting into a boomerang-like shape in the process, One follow-up smack, not even that hard, was all it took to send him spiraling to the ground.

"I've never seen someone try so hard for so little."

A steel-toed boot lashed out at his thigh. The steel crumbled on contact, and he took advantage of the bonehead's pain to slam him against a wall.

"So you put yourself up on a cross and organize every glue-sniffing, cousin-screwing, backwater excuse for the pride of the white race together under one banner. What you gonna do with that? Take a stab at that 'RaHoWa' stuff you keep screaming about?"

Someone tried to come at him with a garrote. They might as well have tried to harness a bull with dental floss. He bucked hard enough to send the guy down at his feet, where he didn't make any effort to get up.

"Great idea. 'Cept for the part where they show up on every terrorist watch list known to man, suck at infiltrating anywhere 'cause your crowd's probably got the fourteen words tattooed across their forehead, and anyone who's not brain dead can see through those kid's show villains you were gonna pin it on."

There was nothing standing between him and her. Except the fact that he didn't trust himself to close the distance just yet.

"Months of planning. All that negotiation to try to get everyone together. And, of course, one dead girl. All that for nothing. Hope it was ****ing worth it."

[Avenger Assembled]

The former Aryan Angel cowered at Midnight's approach, meekly submitting herself for binding and inspection. Her injuries were real, but mostly superficial. The bruises to her face looked very dramatic, but she still had all her teeth and there was no sign of enough damage to produce a hematoma. The only odd thing was a small puncture mark over her wrist, looking like an injection spot.

When the last of her thugs was unconscious, she seemed to relax, as if a stage persona was fading away and the real Greta Ratner was visible beneath. "Well, I guess you got me," she winced, putting out her hands for shackling. She bit her lip and looked at all four of them. "You don't need to hit me again."

Edge frowned, even Mark able to sense an imposture when he saw one. "That's not going to fool a jury, Ratner," he said firmly. "No one's going to sympathize with a Nazi supervillain from another dimension." Truthfully, Mark had a hard time thinking of anything less sympathetic. Except maybe an Omegadrone? He pushed that thought aside, though, and concentrated on glaring at Greta.

"If you say so," she said with a little shrug, batting her eyes coyly. "Anyway, with all the drugs they just injected me with, I don't even know what I'm saying." And with that, another layer seemed to fall away. "Prison doesn't frighten me." Her lip turned in a cold sneer. "You people have no idea what prison is. And as for that dead girl, well, that wasn't my idea. She's the one who wasn't grateful for the world you people gave her. She was better off without it."

[Gizmo]

"How many?" Midnight interjected abruptly, the cold emotionless rumble of gravel pressed against gravel escaping from the filter in his featureless mask. "You know what I am," he observed, his ruby lenses close to her face and shining with might have been reflection or inner, hellish luminance. "On your Earth, how many of your scum did Midnight kill?" The true terror invoked by the question blossomed because it wasn't stated as an idle ponderance nor an angry threat nor a sadistic jab. There was no inflection, no context, and Ratner's mind was free to infer the worst it could summon up. "Edge warps realities. Easy to send you back. A failure." There were faint wisps of mist rising from him now, just enough to blur his outline and sting her eyes. "Sixty seconds to convince me to let you see a prison cell."

[Avenger Assembled]

Ratner bit her lip, her smooth hands clenching into fists, as she flinched away from Midnight. She was obviously scared of Midnight in particular, far more than any of the others. "You've got me," she said, fear in her now-small voice. "What more do you want from me?" Her eyes narrowed behind the too-pretty bruises. "You know what they'll do? They'll strap me down, rip out the skin they grafted onto me, and put it on some other girl. There are a lot of stupid people on this world who think they'll be better off if they kill all the..." she looked like she was about to say something else, then shot a look at Cannonade before adding, "the Jews and the gays. Replacing more won't be that hard."