Cristal Lemieux peered around the stage at the man in the blue uniform and trenchcoat who'd called himself Spymaster. He had taken down two of the costumed people who'd arrived in the helicopter minutes ago with ease, and now he was doing something to the black nosecone-shape of the Molten Heart. Cristal was fifteen years old, and an expert in nothing save for dance, but fifteen years of action movies and television told her that device Spymaster was fixing to the side of the Molten Heart looked a lot like a bomb.

She wondered. She'd known she was a mutant for nearly two years, ever since she'd accidentally iced the ballet floor under her feet during a performance. But she'd never actively used her power over thermal energy, outside of the occasional and minor revenge against a school rival. Her disposition didn't allow her to care terribly much about the fate of Roxxon's raw energy mill.... But on the other hand, her family had major holdings in Roxxon, and she'd paid just enough attention during the presentation to know the Molten Heart was a major initiative for the company. If it were destroyed, her father's coffers would take a major hit.

Decisively, Cristal leaned around the side of the stage, pointed a finger at Spymaster, and aimed a thin tendril of ice at the bomb. Her aim was impeccable, and the bomb froze solid in his hands. Cursing, the saboteur whirled around, and he spotted her immediately. A gun had appeared from inside his trenchcoat, and he popped off three shots in her direction. Cristal just managed to duck back behind the stage before the rounds chewed through the wood where she'd been standing.

<"He...he shot at me!"> Cristal said in disbelief. <"He can't do that!">*

[* Translated from French - Mono-lingual David]

Keeping his gun at the ready, Spymaster began to move toward the stage. He'd been prepared for the other two, but this girl was an unknown quantity. She was obviously a meta, so he had no intention of leaving her free to interfere further. He had a job to do, after all.

The blow came from behind, an elbow to the back of his neck that sent him stumbling forward. He turned...and just managed to duck under a swinging fist.

"Wanna...wanna try this again?" Ricochet asked. He had his fists up like a prize boxer, but he wobbled visibly on his feet. His throat dribbled blood from where Spymaster's tranq dart had landed a minute earlier.

Spymaster rubbed the back of his neck, then holstered his handgun. "I'm impressed. That dart should have put you out for hours."

"I'm full o' s'prises."

"I doubt that. I doubt you've got much left at all."

Rico lunged at him, but Spymaster sidestepped and drove a fist straight up into the young man's diaphragm. The air exploded from Rico's lungs, and he collapsed to the tarmac, gasping.

"Stupid kid. I was ready for you. I was ready for all of you." He gave Ricochet a solid kick in the ribs, knocking him over onto his side, and then turned and started moving back toward the Molten Heart.

He hadn't gone three steps before the tarmac in front of him burst into flames.

"You shot at me!" the tiny black-haired girl shouted. She was showing herself without fear now, striding angrily toward the saboteur, her eyes glowing a bright red. Flame generation as well as ice, then. Instead of engaging her--she was still too much of an unknown quantity--Spymaster pulled his trenchcoat up over his ski-masked face and dove through the wall of fire. He came out the other side sprinting for the Molten Heart.

"Non," Cristal insisted, and iced the pavement in front of the man. He fell onto his back hard.

Satisfied that her job was done--surely these so-called heroes could finish her light work--she looked around at the second young hero Spymaster had taken down. Dressed in stylized blue and white, he'd seemed to have some sort of electrical powers, so Spymaster had coated his face with some sort of non-conductive goop. He was currently writhing on the ground, suffocating.

Well, that was easily sorted. Cristal extended a hand toward him and froze the mask solid. The kid stopped writhing, seemed to gather himself, and then fired a bolt of lightning out of his mouth. The mask shattered, and he sucked in air gratefully.

She looked back toward Spymaster, and was flabbergasted to see that he was on his feet again and still moving toward the Molten Heart. And neither of these "heroes" were going to recover in time to stop him. While her mind was still racing, trying to decide whether to just set the jerk on fire, she saw him turn his sprint into a homerun slide, slipping neatly beneath the undercarriage of the pod. A heartbeat later, he had emerged on the other side, and was running full-tilt toward the admin buildings on the far edge of the airfield.

<"You don't get away that easily,"> she said, and raised a hand in his direction.

"Get down!"

Ricochet tackled her from the side, knocking her down just before the Molten Heart erupted in a geyser of flaming metal and plastic.

"Oh, we are in such deep doggie-doo."

While a hangar burned at their backs, and a flood of humanity fled all around them, the remainder of the New Warriors--Hornet, Turbo, and Spider-Woman--faced a very angry, very powerful man in orange and gold armor on the other side of the airfield.

"Who is this guy?" Hornet asked, his turbines humming softly as he hovered.

"Sunturion," Spider-Woman replied. "He's completely made up of microwaves, got all sorts of powers. He fought Iron Man."

"Iron Man?" Turbo demanded. "The Iron Man?"

"How are we supposed to fight a guy who can hold his own against Iron Man?"

Spider-Woman looked at him. "Did I say he held his own? He kicked Iron Man's ass!"

"Hey, where did he go?"

The other two looked around at Turbo's question. Sunturion had vanished.

"Uh oh..."

"Turbo! Watch it!"

Hornet's cry came too late. Sunturion had become visible again directly behind her and, before she could face him, blasted her across the airfield with such force that her hurtling form punched right through the wall of one of the burning hangars.

"You're all lucky I don't cook you where you stand," Sunturion said, striding slowly toward the remaining two Warriors, like he had all the time in the world. "But that's too easy...you're going to pay for the damage you've done to Roxxon today. You're going to jail, and you're going there for a good long time."

"Listen to me!" Hornet said, putting out his hands palm up to show he meant no harm. "We're here to help, not--!"

"Liar!"

Sunturion became a visible beam of microwaves, and flashed straight into Hornet's power armor. There was a massive KRA-KOW of released electricity, and the man inside the armor went rigid, sparks and fluids spraying out of the armor from seemingly every joint and crevice, until finally his turbines died and he toppled out of the air.

Spider-Woman moved to catch him...but in the moment before she would have, she saw Sunturion materialize right beside her.

Crap.

Deciding the armor would probably protect Eddie from the worst of the impact, she let him drop and instead somersaulted over the barrage of microwave energy that flashed past her. She cast a net of psi-webbing over Sunturion, knowing it would have absolutely no effect on a guy who could go intangible, then hurdled a stack of crates as two more blasts tore by on either side of her, close enough to singe her bare arms.

She landed on the other side of the crates...and found Sunturion standing directly in front of her.

"Damnit!" she shouted, and swung a punch at the creep's orange face. When her fist made contact, it was met with a burst of power that slammed her backward, smashing the crates to splinters as she skidded to a halt on her backside. She was barely conscious as Sunturion moved toward her, his feet not touching the ground.

"Trying...to...help..."

"Save it," Sunturion said, and raised his palm, ready to blast her into unconsciousness.

"Help! Oh god, the computers! It's destroying the files--!"

Sunturion paused, his hand relaxing and his fingers curling into a fist as an aging man in a white labcoat came running by. He was another one of the people fleeing the burning hangar, and Sunturion hadn't paid attention to any of the others before now. But none of the others had been screaming about files being destroyed.

Sunturion vanished, and reappeared in front of the scientist. As Arthur Dearborn, Sunturion was head of the Molten Heart project, and he knew every tech and engineer on his staff. He seized the man by the arms. "What did you say, O'Neal? What did you say?"

"You--you--I don't--"

It was obvious the man was too frightened of the armored face to speak. Sighing, Sunturion shifted back into handsome, well-dressed, familiar Arthur Dearborn. "O'Neal, it's me. Now what is this about files being destroyed?"

The engineer stammered for a moment in obvious surprise--no one besides Hale knew Dearborn was anything other than a high-placed scientist--but then he gathered himself and seemed to realize this wasn't the time to worry about such things.

"There's a worm virus, Mr. Dearborn," O'Neal said. "It's been introduced into the share systems, and it's eating everything that has to do with the Molten Heart. It's insidious and fast-moving, and--and I couldn't do anything about it with the building burning down around me. It's even torn down the firewall and it's spreading to the Internet!"

"No..."

Dearborn's face had gone slack. All his work, two years of his life...

He shifted back into Sunturion, and then he was gone, leaving O'Neal to continue his flight, and the three heroes to slowly regain their senses. All the while, the hangars continued to burn.

"Are you okay?" Ricochet asked.

"I...would be better if...you kindly...got off of me!"

"Oh, like this is the first time I've heard that. Love the accent, by the way."

Ricochet lifted himself off of the French girl (cute, but a little too young for him, by the looks of her), and looked around at the Molten Heart. There wasn't much left of it, but what was there was still burning. Good thing he'd recovered enough from that dart to pay attention to his danger sense, otherwise Miss French and Snotty here would probably be missing her face right now.

He caught a glimpse of the blue guy, Spymaster, dashing toward the cluster of storage buildings on the side of the airfield opposite from the hangars.

"No way, Thighmaster. I'm not 100%, but I'm still good enough to catch you."

He looked over toward Bolt. The guy was on his hands and knees, still sucking in air as he worked to peel the rest of that goop off of his face. He wasn't going to be much help in a footrace. Rico, on the other hand, was feeling better by the second. Whatever Spymaster had shot him with, he'd seriously misjudged the dosage.

He started running, feeling better and better the more his legs pumped. The bad guy reached the buildings half a minute before he did, but Rico had no intention of following him into those narrow walkways and maybe getting bushwhacked for his trouble. Instead, he leapt onto the tongs of a forklift parked conveniently by a loading door. From there, he bounded to the bars laced over the forklift's cab, and then he was high enough to make it to the roof of the nearest building. He sprinted across it and looked over the side, and there was Spymaster, rounding a corner two buildings away.

Rico leapt to the next roof and sprinted until he'd reached the walkway Spymaster had turned down. The saboteur had paused in front of the personnel door to one of the buildings, and was looking around to make sure no one was about. Ricochet plucked a stun disk from his jacket, ready to put the guy's lights out and not feeling particularly ashamed about sucker-punching the jerk...but then Spymaster pulled open the door of the building and slipped inside.

"Oh-ho! The plot thinnens..."

Rico stuck the disk back on his jacket, then leapt down from the roof to follow.

"Spider-Woman! Grab that beam!"

"I'm on it!" Mattie Franklin bounded over the heads of some technicians who, until a few moments ago, had been trapped between two walls of open flame inside one of the burning hangars. She landed on the fuselage of what looked like an experimental aircraft, minus the wings, and looked up.

A badly scorched I-beam that had been threatening to fall from the scaffolding near the ceiling chose that moment to finally let go. Mattie cast a blanket of psi-webbing over it as it fell, to protect herself from the heat. And then she caught it. The impact barely phased her, but it did demolish the thin metal stands the fuselage was supported on, upsetting Mattie's balance and almost forcing her to drop it on the fleeing scientists anyway.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the only structurally shaky part of the scaffolding, and a great chunk of it broke loose and came down with a roaring boom right in front of the bay doors. Hornet barely managed to fire a guide wire around one of the civilians and yank her out of the way. Half of his systems were fried after Sunturion's attack, including his flight motor, but he took a moment to be silently grateful that the wire wasn't one of them.

"Turbo! We need another way out!"

Mickey got some altitude, turned her hyperpunches on the curved wall of the hangar, and blasted a hole through it. Standing on the tarmac directly outside the new opening, was Bolt.

"Cripes, you wanna aim a little higher next time? You almost gave me a buzzcut!"

Spider-Woman bent the steel back, making a wider passage, and the team hurried to get the rest of the civilians out.

"Where's Ricochet?" Turbo asked as she deposited the last of them on the tarmac.

Bolt shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine."

Sunturion phased through the window of his office and dropped to the plush carpet behind his desk. He flipped open his laptop, concentrated for a moment, and then plunged his intangible hand through the keyboard and into the processor.

There was a disorienting moment of transition as his too-human mind raced to translate what he was perceiving inside the processor, and then he found himself floating in the center of a massive silver tunnel, billions of ones and zeros racing down the inside surface. The numbers traveled relative miles away from him, and then they were consumed by a great, burning whiteness at the very end of his vision.

The whiteness. The emptiness the worm virus left behind as it passed. That was what he needed to fight.

He began pumping code into the system, working at speeds almost as fast as the computer's own processor, hoping to kill the virus or divert it or, at the very least, build a rough firewall for it to smash itself into its binary components against. His human mind translated this as racing down the silver tunnel toward the killing white, and casting a glowing curtain of energy over it.

But the whiteness actually seemed to feed on his power, and it flashed outward suddenly in a virtual nuclear explosion.

"NO!"

The white burned everything else away, leaving him floating in a void.

Well, almost a void. Letters miles and miles tall hovered before him, giant black avatars of his failure. They spelled:

FILE NOT FOUND

"no..."

Sunturion blinked and he was in his office again, his hand still plunged into the keyboard. He looked at that connection for a moment until, snarling, he flexed his fingers, and the laptop and the desk it was sitting on were blown to dust. Then he roared out of the office again, shattering the glass this time, and most of the wall it was attached to on his way out.

The room was lined with desks, packed together so tightly it brought to mind easy analogies about sardine tins. And it was hot. And Jonas Hale, standing there in the midst of this crisis with a tiny smile, like all the cards were still his, was an annoying bastard. All of this added up to make Francois Lemieux a very unhappy man.

"What are we doing here?" he demanded. "We should be out there, on the tarmac, trying to contain the damage!"

"And what exactly would we do 'out there', Francois? The fire department and the police will be here shortly. Those metas in the helicopter will see to saving the people in the hangars--"

"But I thought you said they were--"

"Just be still, Francois. Five more minutes, and I promise all your questions will be answered."

Francois called Hale something rude in French, but Jonas just kept smiling. It was all coming together. The board had been sure this was one scam even Hale couldn't pull off, but here they were, and all the major players were behaving exactly as he'd predicted. The thing with those super-kids had been a stroke of luck--keeping Dearborn distracted long enough to take care of the Molten Heart had been the only part he was really worried about, but the kids had seen to that after the faked attack by the Armor Oil goons drew that Spider-Woman chippie into it. From here on out, it should be clear sailing.

The door creaked open, and Spymaster stepped into the room. "It's done," he said, nodding at Hale. "The prototype's destroyed and the virus has been introduced. The fires are taking care of the rest of the physical evidence."

"Who is this?" Lemieux barked. Hale sighed and rolled his eyes behind his mirrored sunglasses, reminding himself that the fat Frenchman was a valued member of Roxxon's board of directors. Then he flipped out his cellphone, hit a button and put it to his ear.

"Do it," he said, then snapped the phone closed again and looked toward Spymaster. "The money's been transferred into the account you specified. I--and Roxxon--thank you for a job well done."

"You should know by now, Hale. You hire Spymaster, that's the only kinda job you get."

"I. Don't. Believe. You."

All three men looked in different directions, and all of them found themselves looking at the blank mask of Sunturion. The man's face had appeared in the screens of every PC on every desktop throughout the room. Beams of coherent energy fired out of each of the monitors and converged on a single spot right next to Hale, coalescing into the full physical form of Sunturion.
Almost faster than the eye could follow, Spymaster's hand disappeared into his trenchcoat, and reappeared with a handgun. He fired, and the explosive tip bullet passed right through Sunturion and exploded against the opposite wall of the room. Sunturion flicked his eyes in Spymaster's direction, and the gun melted in the saboteur's hand. He started to cry out in pain and surprise, but was cut short when Sunturion blasted him backwards through a row of desks.

"Two years of work, Mr. Hale. Two years of my life! I knew you were up to something when I hacked into your files, but this! Why?"

Lemieux was hiding behind Hale, but the focus of Sunturion's ire was just giving with an easy grin, as if this was all a simple misunderstanding, and any minute now Dearborn would see that.

"Why, Arthur? For the simple reason that 'your work'...didn't."

"What are you talking about?"

"The photovoltaic cells, Arthur. They never worked."

"No, you're lying. I checked that work myself."

"But you haven't been directly involved in that aspect of the development for over a year, and there's a reason for that. We realized a while ago that there was just no way to make the collector cells efficient enough to collect the energy, but durable enough to push into the planet's mantle. So the board and I slowly pulled you back, put you to work as a manager rather than a scientist. So you never knew. In fact, I believe Mr. Lemieux here was in on that decision."

Sunturion gave Lemieux a look. The fat man gulped.

"But why go to all this trouble?" Sunturion was pacing now, gesticulating wildly. "Why not just admit failure and move on? Why waste an entire year building up to this fiasco?"

"Do you know how many tax dollars the government gave us when we started showing results in the first year? Let me give you a hint, Arthur: lots. Roxxon can't afford to lose that much face, or that much money. And so...this. Our friend there--the one you just knocked silly--has planted evidence that will implicate our competitor, Armor Oil, in all of this. We lose the project, and maybe a little bit of faith from our benefactors in Congress, but Armor Oil is in for a hell of a storm when this gets out."

As he talked, Hale stole a glance over Sunturion's shoulder and saw that Spymaster was getting to his feet. The saboteur steadied himself against a wall, then reached back into his trenchcoat and drew out yet another gun. This one was sleek and utterly black, like something out of <i>Star Wars.</i> It was a rad-eater, a handheld weapon designed to disperse energy beings in general, and Sunturion in particular. Hale had given it to Spymaster on the very real chance that Dearborn wouldn't go for all this, despite his history of being a toe-the-line company-man. Apparently Spymaster had decided the freak wasn't going for it.

Hale agreed, so he kept talking, returning his eyes to Sunturion's faceplate.

There was a BANG, and for just a heartbeat, Hale thought Spymaster had fired, but then he saw the cover go flying off of a vent overhead, followed by a bright yellow disk that arrowed out of the shaft and bounced off of the back of Spymaster's skull. The saboteur was unconscious before he struck the floor.

A pair of silver boots poked out of the vent shaft, attached to a teenage boy in a blue-and-white uniform and dark blue jacket. He dropped to the floor and marched indignantly toward Spymaster to retrieve his disk.

"You guys got some problems! I mean it, man. Everybody in this room except him." He jabbed a finger at Sunturion as he used the other hand to hang the disk back on his jacket. "The rest of you are going to jail...and I hope you get some psychiatric help, 'cause the lights are on, but nobody's been home for ages, and all the bulbs are about to burn out. You dig?"

"Who are you?" Hale asked, looking flustered for the first time this morning. Then his face cleared, and the confident smile returned. "You're one of those kids, aren't you? The superheroes. What do you call yourselves again?"

"The New Warriors, spanky. Don't bother writing it down, because I don't think you're gonna forget us any time soon." He picked up the rad-eater, looked at it for a moment, then tossed it to Sunturion. "He was going to shoot you with this. Think maybe he got it from your boss?"

"You're out of your depth here, kid," Hale pressed, while Sunturion studied the gun. "What're you going to do, testify to what you heard? You really think any court in America is going to accept the testimony of a kid in a mask?"

"That's for shooting me in the neck, you trigger-happy dork," Rico said, kicking Spymaster in the ribs. Then to Hale, "You're forgetting something Magnum P.I. I got the saboteur."

"No," Sunturion said suddenly. "You don't."

Blistering torrents of microwaves cascaded over Ricochet, and he would have screamed in pain if he'd had time. He lasted three seconds under the barrage, and then collapsed over Spymaster's back.

"Arthur!" Hale cried, pumping a fist in the air. "I knew we could count on you, old man! You always were a bit of a straight edge, but you've come to your senses!"

Sunturion strode over to where the two costumed men had fallen , stooped down, and picked Ricochet up. "I've worked for Roxxon for too long to let someone threaten it, Mr. Hale," he said. "But that was my last act as a Roxxon employee. You can consider this my resignation."

Sunturion looked at the wall, and it erupted outward in a shower of plaster and wood. And then he simply walked out, carrying Ricochet and leaving Hale and Lemieux to pick up the pieces.

The fire trucks had arrived minutes ago, and were working valiantly to keep the blaze in check. But it was obvious to everyone there--including the New Warriors Hornet, Bolt, Turbo, and Spider-Woman--that it was a lost cause. The hangars were gone, and whatever they'd contained was lost.

"Man," Bolt breathed. "Helluva way to start a new superhero team, huh?"

"At least we got everybody out," Spider-Woman said, but even to her own ears it sounded like reaching.

"Oh crap. Get ready guys, here comes trouble."

At Turbo's warning, they all turned and watched as Sunturion dropped to the tarmac before them. They started to fall into battle stances...but then they saw who the man was carrying.

"Rico!" Hornet said.

"Let him go, you thick-headed asshole!" Spider-Woman railed, moving forward, waving her fist. "He didn't do anything to you!"

"On the contrary, he saved my life." Sunturion knelt and gently set Ricochet on the ground. And then he took a step back, giving Hornet and Turbo room to rush forward and check on their teammate. "You may want to get him some water...he's suffering from dehydration."

Hornet looked up sharply at that, his teeth grinding together in frustration. "Dehydration. Funny...that's what microwaves do, isn't it?"

"I apologize for attacking you. I know now that you had nothing to do with all this, that you were only trying to help. I have been...horribly misguided in my actions for many, many years." He looked off toward the blackened wrecks where the hangars used to be. All the hardware, all the files both local and remote, all gone.

"But I believe it's time to change that."

And then he flashed away, leaving a sparkling trail through the smoke-filled sky.

<"Cristal! There you are, my darling!">

Cristal Lemieux stopped three steps inside the doorway and met her father's charge, allowing him to scoop her up in his arms and fawn over her. The room was wrecked--half the desks that had filled it an hour ago were smashed to splinters, and there was an enormous hole in the west wall, facing out onto the airfield. Police swarmed over the place. Jonas Hale was on the other side of the room, giving a statement.

"No one was more shocked than I was to find out Mr. Dearborn would do something like this. Obviously the process that turned him into this energy being has had a slow but dramatic effect on his mind..."

<"Are you hurt?"> her father was asking. She started and looked around at him, as if she was surprised to find him there. Then she shook her head. <"Why did you wander away like that? You could have been killed!">

Cristal didn't answer. She looked at Hale again, and thought of what she'd seen when she'd followed that costumed boy with the jacket--Ricochet, she believed his name was--when she'd followed him into this building. He'd taken to the air ducts, and she couldn't have followed without alerting him to her presence, but by that time, she'd been far enough inside that she'd heard her father and Hale speaking with the saboteur, with Spymaster. So she'd creeped closer, positioned herself right outside the door. And she'd heard everything.

<"Cristal, are you sure you're alright?">

She looked at her father again, and she nodded. But deep down, she wondered if she might not have to rethink her feelings toward him before too much longer.

No one had talked much since they'd left Cairo, the deadpan whup-whup-whup of the War-Chopper's rotors were the only sound as they made their way back toward New York City. Ricochet in particular had flatly ignored even the most obvious attempts at getting him to talk. He simply sat on the edge of the helicopter's open side door, sipping on a bottle of water the firefighters had given him and letting his feet dangle out over the New York state countryside.

Nobody needed to point out that they had failed today. Sure they'd saved a lot of people in those hangars, but they couldn't do a damn thing about the nasty bit of corporate warfare Roxxon was preparing to unleash on Armor Oil. Nobody had died, true, but the bad guy still got exactly what he wanted. And that was almost as bad.

"Well...look at it this way," Bolt said, turning from the co-pilot seat to look back at his teammates. "If we had found some way to implicate Roxxon in all of this, it might have put a lot of people out of work, right?"

Rico ignored this, and Turbo--who was piloting--kept her eyes on the sky, but Spider-Woman and Hornet gave him scathing looks. Bolt raised his eyebrows, said "Ooo-kay," and turned back toward the controls.

The rest of the trip passed in silence, and soon, Turbo was pressing the remote access switch for the Crash Pad's skylight--there was a Post-It note labeled GARAGE DOOR next to it--and guiding the helicopter down into the hangar.

They were filing out of the helicopter when the striking blonde girl in a skintight orange bodysuit dropped through the open skylight after them.

"Oh my gosh," Ultra Girl said. "Are you guys alright? I saw what happened in Cairo on TV, and I got here as soon as I could from the Secret Hospital set--"

"Hectic shooting schedule, huh?" Spider-Woman spat. No one else paid much attention to the new arrival.

"What--what's that supposed to mean?"

"I've got a better question for you," a new voice said from the shadows in one corner of the hangar. That got everyone's attention, and they all turned as the intruder stepped into view.

He was wearing a bulky suit of high-tech armor, mostly black with red piping. The first thought that flashed through most of their heads was Iron Man, but only two of the Warriors present--Turbo and Spider-Woman--managed to piece together who the guy was, despite his new look. Turbo gasped.

"Just where the hell do you people get off calling yourselves the New Warriors?" the new Night Thrasher demanded.

Anyway, let's get to the review. I had to dig deep in the mail bags to find this one. It's from from our dear-departed founder Dino Pollard. Dino doesn't write anything anymore, so you can just forget the plugs, buddy!

This would be one of my favorite books at M2K if only it came out on a regular basis!! Sheesh guys, get on the ball already...

Probably my fault. Mike finished issue #4 in, like, an hour. And if he'd had another plot to work from then, he probably would have dove straight into #5 (thereby saving me the trouble of writing it months later). But he didn't, so he didn't.

Anyway, #6 is already scripted, just has to be proofread, so it should be out soon. Not that you're around to read it anymore. Loser.

Russ's plots are amazing. And Mike's scripting is dead-on. He's a natural with the teen banter going on in this book. The best part is, naturally, the interactions between Hornet and Ricochet (glad to see that Hornet is on the team, BTW). And despite my earlier reservations, I'm interested in seeing how Russ and Mike weave Crux into the group.

Well, Crux was intended to be a full member by the end of #9, preceded of course by her guest-appearance in this story arc (did you see her?). It'll be up to the next writer to determine if that ever happens now, though.

Letters concerning this issue can be sent directly to me at RussLee74@comcast.net, posted to the Marvel 2000 mailing list (you can join at Yahoogroups), or on the M2K message board, accessible from the M2K main page.

- Russ Anderson
21 September 2002

Story © 2002, Russ Anderson. Most characters presented are property of Marvel Entertainment Group.