May 16th: Let's Discuss Doom

[Veronica Freud]

Ronnie was one of the first team members to arrive, having made a report back to Excalibur as soon as Doom and his lackeys had been out of earshot. She was dressed in her uniform, sitting impatiently.

[Ryan Gabriel]

Ryan, however, was close behind her, in business mode as usual.

[Veronica Freud]

"Well, that was... interesting." Ronnie mumbled.

[Kevin Gravis]

Kevin was next in.

"Doom's trying to take over the world again isn't he?"

[Ryan Gabriel]

"He's always trying to take over the world," Ryan said. "Or kill someone. That's always a possibility too."

[Veronica Freud]

"Probably. Which I totally don't get. A country is enough for me, the whole world would just be gluttonous."

[Ryan Gabriel]

"Well, this looks like a magic thing. So it's probably a 'get my awesome power, and everyone does what I want when I want or else, fuck 'em' thing."

[Narrator]

"I'm glad you all could make it.

Miss Freud, you had some information?" Agent Pennington asked.

[Ryan Gabriel]

Why do we get stuck with this douchebag instead of Wisdom? Ryan thought, keeping his face neutral as he sat there, ready to take notes.

[Veronica Freud]

"Ah, yes." Ronnie cleared her throat softly before she sat up straight and professionally.

"While escorting Doom during last night's game, he suddenly excused himself from our presence. At the suggestion of other team members, commendable quick thinking by-the-way, I was able to follow Doom discretely and observe what he was up to.

"First bit of information; he's faking his fraility, at least to some extent. When he thought he was out of sight of us he ditched the cane and began walking normally. I've really got no theories about this one, there could be dozens of reasons for him to fake it.

"Secondly, he was doin' voodoo at the game. Chalk circle on the floor, incantations, the works. Since he was usin' a couple of team jerseys and a ball it looked like he was tryin' to cast a spell to make the Latverian team win. But really, it coulda just been a front for somethin' else, I know nothin' about magic. And I dunno if it could be considered cheatin' by the official rules.

"Lastly, one of his aids interrupted him to tell him somethin' about ley lines." She paused for a moment. "That the signs were ready, and then the lackey said the words 'ley lines'. It didn't mean nothin' to me but it was apparently important enough that Doom, dropped his devil worshippin' and forgave the interruption then returned to the booth."

She leaned back in her chair a bit. "Of course, there's the possibility that he knew I was there and was messing with us. He seemed interested in my absence when he got back to the booth."

[Narrator]

"That goes along our findings. We're now positive Doom has been playing us all--and that whatever he happens to be up to, he's been planning it for a long time. While it's possible he was trying to fool you, Ms. Freud, I don't think he's just messing with you for kicks.

We've been tracing the path of Doom's terrorist attackers. We've traced it back through the Red Hand, Saor Eire, AIM, the Ulster Defense, and Jaish-e-Mohammed, just to name a few. We've traced it back, we believe, three years, to a meeting in Serbia. We believe Doom to have been there."

[Victoria Valentine]

There was something of a commotion outside, and then the locked door to the briefing room came open. It'd taken Victoria long enough to find out that the team running 'security' for Doom was meeting in here, and she'd spent longer than she liked bickering over why she needed to be let in. She only, after all, wanted to go through this once, with one round of stupid questions from all the little muggles who thought she wanted to turn everyone into toads.

"Good," she said, "This is the right room. I know what Doom is doing. Or... at least the part of it that falls into my area of expertise." There. That ought to start the first round of silly questions.

[Jubilation Lee]

Jubilee, who had been following and trying to stop Victoria, hesitated when she heard this, still glaring bloody murder at the girl as she listened.

[Janice Gilbertson]

Captain Britain looked from Ronnie to Pennington to Victoria.

"...why does her arrival not reassure me?"

[Ryan Gabriel]

"Because you're intelligent?" Ryan quipped.

[Narrator]

"And you are?"

[Victoria Valentine]

"When the problem turns to something needing to be shot or punched, we'll ask for your input, thank you very bloody much," she snapped to Janice and Ryan. "My name is Victoria Valentine. Resident sorceress."

"He's moving the bloody ley lines," she said, as if this explained everything about the situation anyone could need to know.

[Veronica Freud]

"I called it!" Ronnie said, at the mention that Doom might have very well been behind the terrorist attacks. Her gloating was cut short by Victoria's arrival.

"... um, maybe you could tell us why that's bad, or what they are? I don't really know other than it has somethin' to do with ancient people buildin' monuments along 'em."

[Victoria Valentine]

Victoria resisted the urge to visibly count to ten. "Something about that, yes," she said to Ronnie as she strode up to the display board. She hated using the touch-sensitive board... kept expecting it to short out, but using magic for the display would be unnecessarily showy. "All right... Ley Lines 101 for all of you. You have sites of power all over the world. Temples, monuments, sometimes palaces... they can take a lot of forms, and they're easier for sorcerors to find than people who can't touch magic, obviously. Connecting all of them, you'll find ley lines." She drew a rough hash of lines, marking arrows along them to represent the magical currents. "They're ancient, and they're as much a part of the world as the oceans and the mountains. What this idiot is doing is picking them up and pulling them to different spots." She drew a loop coming from one of the lines, then another, then another, back to one spot at the bottom, so that their flow pointed into a single spot. And then she stopped, like this explained everything. Which, honestly, she thought it did.

[Veronica Freud]

"So, I'm guessin' this is gonna upset the planet's natural flow, like if we suddenly changed all the weather on earth, right?" Ronnie said. "All that energy goin' to one point, it can't be safe. It's gotta be like a... magic Chernobyl, or a big magic zit just waitin' to be popped."

She leaned forward in her seat a bit. "Miss... would I be dumb in assumin' that the spot where all these streams are bein' redirected would happen to fall within Latveria's borders?"

[Victoria Valentine]

"Yes, you would," she said. "And it's not a would happen. It's been happening. The plagues that showed up here. The weather being so abnormally screwed up. People losing their memories. It's already happening. He's not directing them back to Latveria. He's directing them to the one place in the world with more naturally occuring ley line confluences in close proximity than any other. Right here. You didn't think he actually gave a good damn about football, did you?"

[Veronica Freud]

Ronnie didn't like being called dumb. After all she was making an effort to understand a field outside of her expertise and was being open-minded. But taking such comments personally wouldn't help matters.

"Well, he did use voodoo to help his team play better." She mumbled. "We had no idea he was messin' with these things though, how could we?"

She could stomp the albino into salsa later.

[Jubilation Lee]

"Today London, tomorrow the world?"

[Janice Gilbertson]

"There's... a rather important location not far from here, yes."

[Victoria Valentine]

"I don't think anyone would have expected this," Victoria said, nodding at Ronnie. "This is the equivalent of nuking a city because you want to clear the land to build your house. Except in this case, it's the whole world he's smashing. It's monumentally destructive, and bloody dangerous to do beside." She pointed to the lines again. "The ley lines are the currents that magic flows on. Doing this," she pointed to the loops directing it into one place, "He's building it all up in one spot. Once he does that, he can walk in, tap into them, and pull the whole planet's magic into himself. Then he can just go with it where he pleases, it's just that this is the best place to route it all to, since so much magic is here already. Frankly, he might be stupid to even try it, because I think there are even odds he'll pop like a ripe tomato when he gets overloaded. But as this is Doctor Bloody Doom, I don't want to assume that."

[Narrator]

"So, we need to go arrest him, then, if what you're saying is true."

[Janice Gilbertson]

"How do you arrest him for that, though? Is anything he's done illegal?"

[Victoria Valentine]

"And that wouldn't solve the problem, either," Victoria said. She pointed at the picture. "If we stop him now, the lines stay like this, and things stay screwed up. I don't know how he's loosening them to move them... but we need to find that out. If we can catch him doing it, I can make arrangements to get things fixed. But if we stop him now? It's dangerous enough what he's doing. Trying to undo it blindly could be even more destructive."

[Veronica Freud]

"So we've either gotta catch him in the act and see what he's doin', and hope you can fix it... or try to convince him to see the error of his ways." Ronnie looked around the room.

"Does anyone here know how to control squirrels? I read somewhere that worked on him before."

[Ryan Gabriel]

"I dunno. I heard that that was just a malfunctioning Doombot. It's hard to tell with that asshole."

[Veronica Freud]

"If I'da known he was up to this sorta shit I wouldn't've been so nice to him." Ronnie said, crossing her arms.

[Ryan Gabriel]

Ryan looked over at Ronnie with not quite as much 'I told you so' in his glance as he might have been entitled to.

[Veronica Freud]

Ronnie caught it, and rolled her eyes.

"Well excuuuuuuuuse me for tryin' to play the diplomatic card. I figured if everyone else was gonna treat 'im like shit I might as well try to do at least a little PR work. If you tried harder maybe I wouldn't have had to hang offa him like Princess Leia in a gold bikini."

[Ryan Gabriel]

Ryan just smirked. "The jerk tried to kill my family. That was diplomatic."

[Narrator]

"What precisely would you suggest, Mis..Valentine?"

[Victoria Valentine]

"Watch him. Watch him like a bloody hawk, and when he tries something, that's when we do something about it."

[Narrator]

"So, catch him in the act, then? And THEN arrest him?"

[Byrna Cooper]

"Well, we need to be doing something. And I don't think he will respond well to a frank and enlightened discussion on the nature of magic!"

[Victoria Valentine]

"Arrest him," Victoria almost laughed. "You find him... I'll work on the 'what to do' part."

[Narrator]

"I think we can handle one man, Miss Valentine," Agent Pennington said. "If you know what to do about the ley lines, then..."