“Seen anything like this before?” Patty asked just a fraction of a second before I could.
“Crystals,” Ben said, nodding. “In the old Atlantis days.”
It always freaked me out a little when someone I knew as a regular person here in Las Vegas started talking about Atlantis. Not the casino, the actual continent and civilization that had actually existed and then had been destroyed. And more often than not, that person had actually been alive during the time of Atlantis.
Stan nodded. “I sort of remember hearing something like that from Laverne once.”
“Do you remember who was doing it back then?” I asked Ben, then realized how stupid my question was. His memory was amazing and he could remember every detail and information in every book he had ever read.
“The God of Electricity,” Ben said. “Actually, the real experiments in time and electrical powers were done by her assistant.”
“Oh, no,” Stan said, shaking his head.
Screamer and Patty and I just stared at my boss until Screamer finally said, “You want to fill us in on the problem?”
Ben nodded and took over from Stan, who for the God of Poker, looked suddenly very upset.
“Far before Atlantis, a giant by the name of Arges was the God of Lightning. He was a fan of Zeus and gave him the power to fire electrical bolts, which is why Zeus became known after centuries as being able to use lightning as a weapon.”
I so wanted to ask about so much of this, because as I had discovered in my short years of being a superhero, the gods of mythology had often existed, and some of them still did. I had never heard if Zeus was still around, and had never had the courage to ask, to be honest.
Ben went on, with me saying nothing.
“When the gods and the giants managed to banish the Titans to the city that lies under Las Vegas, Arges was injured in the battle and he stepped down and gave his duties over to his daughter, who was a god. He died from his injuries before Atlantis came into being.”
“Who was his daughter?” I asked.
Ben looked at me very puzzled, then said, “I need to spend some time with you getting you up to speed on the history of the gods, don’t I?”
“I’ve been saying that,” I said. “At least to myself.”
“When this is over,” Ben said, giving me that grandfather look he sometimes gave me, “we’ll make the time.”
“Laverne is Arges’s daughter,” Stan said. “Back in Atlantis, as Laverne was taking over more and more duties, she gave the duty of electricity to the Goddess Horae, a good friend of hers who also had control over planting and seasons and things like that.”
“And a young man, a superhero of sorts,” Ben said, “began work for Horae as Atlantis boomed. Over the centuries there, he got himself in and out of many troubles with his experiments with electricity and using it in different forms of travel and controlling time.”
“What’s his name?” Patty asked, again right before I could.
Ben shrugged. “Nothing worth pronouncing right now. Last I heard, in Atlantis, he went by Nicky.”
“Still a superhero?” Screamer asked.
Ben nodded. “Last time I heard, still officially working for Horae, when or if she can ever track him down. He used to throw some wild parties, which is what caused part of his problems.”
“And he could do things like this time bubble over the building?” I asked Ben.
“More than likely he could.”
I didn’t like the sounds of that. “When was the last time anyone saw him?”
Ben glanced at Stan, who only shrugged. “Atlantis,” Ben said, “about sixty years before it was destroyed.”
Okay, that silenced our little group standing in the blue and white plush hallway inside a giant time bubble.
For some reason my friends thought a guy who hadn’t been seen in more thousands of years than I wanted to think about had done this to a modern apartment building here in Las Vegas.
I managed to not laugh. “I think we need another suspect.”
And that also sent the entire group back into silence.
4
“There are no other suspects,” Screamer said after a moment of silence in the hallway.
I just didn’t think a guy who hadn’t been seen since Atlantis was the logical choice, so I changed the point of focus.
“How about we do a search of the entire building,” I said. “See if we can find anyone moving.”
Stan and Ben both nodded, so I sent Ben and Screamer to one apartment, Stan to another, and Patty and I would handle a third on this floor. Then we would check the last one and work our way down.
However, the search ended just about as quickly as it started.
As we neared the four doors to the four penthouses near the elevators, modern jazz dance music blared out over the hallway, almost vibrating one of the doors. The music seemed to be right out of the 1940s big band era.
Patty looked at me with a puzzled look and all I could do was shrug.
“That form of music was very popular in Atlantis,” Ben said softly.
I just shook my head for a moment. Great, just great. Maybe this Nicky guy was inside.
I had no idea what I was walking into, but with Stan at my side and Patty and Ben and Screamer close behind, I used one of my superpowers to unlock the door and slowly eased it open, letting the intense loud music smack me in the face. It sounded like an entire band was just around the corner in the main area of the penthouse apartment.
And then, over the intense music, I caught the sound of laughing and talking.
Lots of laughing and lots of talking. Actually more like shouting, since that was all anyone could do over that amount of noise.
I eased around a corner of the entryway so I could see the huge main room of the penthouse and then just stood there, my mouth open, staring at about fifty people dancing, all dressed in brightly-colored robes and togas and all barefoot on the plush white carpet. The expensive white furniture had been pushed back to the sides to form the large dance floor.
The main room of the big apartment was completely full of people.
Everyone was young and all clearly having a great time.
I felt like I had walked into a college frat party. I hated drunken kids’ parties when in college, thought them stupid beyond words and never went to a one, mostly because I never joined a fraternity or any other group for that matter.
I didn’t much care for the party I was staring at either.
There were so many colors jumping up and down and swirling around, I almost got dizzy trying to watch it.
Suddenly, one of the dancers on the edge of the mob spotted us and smiled and broke away from his partner, a blonde with far too much long hair that seemed to function as a second robe and only allowed glimpses of her smiling face.
The guy coming toward us had long brown hair that looked like it was cut by putting a bowl over his head. He had on a brown robe that seemed a cross between a bathrobe and a toga.
He was smiling a huge smile that lit up his face and the smile reached his eyes. Beads of sweat had formed on his forehead from the dancing and I noticed the apartment had started to heat up.
None of my alarms were going off about him, so he wasn’t a threat. At least I didn’t think my alarms had sounded. Even inside my own head, I wasn’t certain I would have heard them in this noise.
The music still pounded at me like a hammer and I could tell it was everything Patty could do to not cover her ears.
As the kid got closer, he went straight at Ben and gave him a hug.
“Uncle Ben,” the kid shouted over the noise. “What are you doing here?”
Finally Stan couldn’t take it any longer. He took us out of time, instantly silencing the music. I almost staggered at the relief.
“Thank you,” Patty sighed softly.
Screamer just shook his head as if trying to clear it.
I didn’t know it was possible to have a time bubble inside a
nother time bubble, but it seemed it was. Thankfully.
My ears were ringing and even with that I could tell this guy wasn’t a threat.
All the dancers were now frozen in wild positions of movements, bright-colored robes and hair flung all over the place. From a few of the loose robes, I could tell that underwear wasn’t a fashion these kids believed in.
“Sorry,” the kid who had hugged Ben said, still smiling. “A little loud I suppose, but figured we weren’t bothering anyone.”
Ben just shook his head and turned to face Stan and the rest of us. “This is my nephew, Nicky.”
“From Atlantis?” I blurted out, not even wanting to know how he was Ben’s nephew.
“Where else?” Nicky asked, still smiling.
Oh, wow. And I thought I had a lot to learn about history.
5
Ben introduced us all.
Nicky gave Patty a very broad smile and a slight kiss on the back of her hand. He was a real charmer, this guy.
After the introductions, Ben said, “Your mother and Horae have both been very worried about you.”
I didn’t want to even ask who his mother was.
Nicky actually looked puzzled at that and my alarm bells suddenly went off at full force. This kid had no idea where or when he was.
Not a clue.
“Nicky,” I said, indicating the kid should come with me, “I want to show you something.”
Ben nodded and I led the young superhero across the room toward the big windows. The others followed me through the frozen crowd until we all stood beside one of the huge floor-to-ceiling windows.
I pointed at The Strip below and then at the desert around the city. “You know where you are?”
He shrugged, looking out over the city. “Never seen the place before,” he said. “North quadrant, maybe.”
“North quadrant of what?” I asked as Ben shook his head and looked down at the soft white carpet.
“Of Atlantis,” Nicky said. “Where else.”
I turned to Ben. “What was this area called in the time of Atlantis?”
“This was mostly all ocean and swamp,” Ben said softly. “This land mass was much lower at the time, so we really had no name for this area.”
Nicky looked at me, then at his uncle, a look of panic starting to cross his face.
“What exactly did you do to make this building be in a time bubble?” I asked.
“Any building,” Nicky said. “We all jam into a mountain cabin that I put the bubble around. I can jump the field out of time and have it go around a larger building. That gives us all a place to party and not even be gone more than an hour or so.”
“How do you pick the building?” I asked.
He shrugged, looking out over the city below. “I don’t. My machine does. Chronos is going to be angry at me for jumping in time, isn’t he?”
I ignored that question. “How do all these people get here?”
“Portal near the device down on the ground floor,” Nicky said. “Everyone was already in the cabin before I locked up the building. So a portal down on the main floor is the only way in and out. When exactly is this?”
Silence. I couldn’t answer him because I honestly didn’t know the answer.
Finally Ben said softly, “This time is about eleven thousand years after Atlantis was destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” Nicky asked, looking like he might faint at any moment.
“You haven’t been seen since about sixty years ahead of the destruction, Ben said.”
Now the kid simply dropped to the floor, his eyes blank, his smile long gone.
So we had a young inventor superhero that had brought about fifty people with him through time to the present. We couldn’t let him or any of them just go back, because in this history, our history, my history, he didn’t go back.
This was going to take a time travel expert far, far smarter than I was to unravel the mess that Nicky had just caused.
I looked around at all the dancers frozen in a moment of pure enjoyment, then down at the young man sitting on the floor staring down at the depths of the plush carpet.
My warning voice was tingling.
Something was still very, very wrong. And I needed to figure out what.
But for the life of me, at the moment I just couldn’t ask poor Nicky another question.
Not after the reality he just faced.
6
We all stood there in silence until finally what had been worrying me crawled its ugly way to the surface of my mind. And when it poked out, I shuddered.
I turned to my team, letting Nicky sit on the floor and stew in his own thoughts.
“If this time bubble gets shut off, the bubble is going to haul us back to the past as well with it.”
“But it doesn’t go back to the past,” Stan said, staring at the dancers. “We know that because Nicky disappears.”
“In this timeline,” I said.
Stan started to open his mouth and shut it, suddenly lost in his thoughts.
“Have I ever said that time travel gives me a headache?” I asked.
Patty smiled at me as I turned and kneeled down beside Nicky.
“How is this time bubble around the building set to recall?”
“One day exactly from the moment it left,” he said. “Automatically. It will return within thirty minutes of leaving.”
“And it takes everyone who is inside it at that moment with it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “I would assume so. This is the first time I’ve ever tried it. I figured if the bubble took along anyone who didn’t belong, I would just send the hitchhikers back where they belonged before they noticed.”
Now my stomach was really twisting. We had an untested machine that could take us all at any moment.
I stood and looked at Patty. “Any idea how many people live in this building?”
“Oh, my,” she said, her face white. “Maybe around 500 people at any given time.”
It was the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday, so not all of them would be in the building, but a large number of them would be.
Stan and Ben and Screamer had been listening and all three of them were just shaking their heads slowly, Stan staring at the dancers.
All my team looked like I was feeling.
Shocked.
Around us, all of Nicky’s friends from Atlantis remained frozen in different positions of dance, their brightly-colored robes spread out or twisted around them, smiles covering their faces.
If we were inside this building when it shifted back, we would end up in a timeline where Nicky returned to Atlantis with his friends. And everyone from Las Vegas time in this building would go with him and suddenly find themselves thousands of years in the past. And all of them would be lost to this world and all their families.
That would be a missing person’s case for the ages.
And if we stopped this, Nicky and his friends would be stuck here, lost to all their families.
And since it was a new invention, who knew if the timer was right or would even work.
Or if it went off, where or when it would send any of us.
Wonderful. Just wonderful.
We were so screwed.
I had to admit, Nicky here had really invented something to cause problems.
“I’m open to ideas,” I said, glancing around at my team.
I didn’t even have one of my normally stupid ideas or random thoughts.
Patty, Screamer, Ben, and Stan all just stood there looking blankly. We all seemed to understand this was a disaster where no matter what we did, no one won.
“So what’s going on?” Laverne demanded as she walked into the room. Lady Luck had on her normal power suit and her hair was pulled back. She also had on tennis shoes instead of her normal dress shoes. More than likely she knew she was going to have to climb twenty flights of stairs when she came into the time bubble.
She looked at the crowd of frozen d
ancers with a puzzled frown, then looked at Ben. “Why are those kids dressed like they are from an Atlantis college party?”
“Because they are,” Ben said.
That made the frown on Lady Luck’s face just get deeper.
Behind me, Nicky was climbing to his feet. “Hi, Aunt Laverne,” he said, stepping up beside me, his voice soft and his eyes not meeting hers, but instead staying focused firmly on the carpet in front of him.
“Oh, shit,” Lady Luck said, seeing him. She clearly understood the situation, or at least part of it, instantly.
She stepped forward and seemed to tower over the cowering Nicky.
“So you are responsible for the greatest mystery in all of Atlantis, the Lost Fifty,” she said.
She glanced at Stan, then focused back on Nicky.
Ben was nodding slowly, his gaze also aimed directly at the carpet.
Nicky wisely said nothing.
Lady Luck shook her head, clearly disgusted and saying nothing. Having Lady Luck disgusted at me was my worst nightmare. And I had some horrid nightmares at times, but having her disgusted at me was the worst one.
Finally, Lady Luck turned to look at the frozen dancers, then at Stan, touching his arm slightly for a moment, and then finally she looked at me. “We can’t let these kids go back. They did not return in this timeline. They were lost to their families a very long time ago.”
I nodded.
“We know that,” I said. “But we have another problem as well. Nicky thinks his machine will just take everyone in the building when it automatically jumps.”
Beside me Nicky nodded.
“Even the people from this time period who are in time stasis in the building?” Laverne asked, her voice as cold and as angry as I could ever imagine it getting. The windows seemed to vibrate from the tension in her words.
I know I did.
“I think so,” Nicky said. “I don’t know for sure. It might. I don’t know.”
I thought the poor kid was going to break into tears, but somehow he just kept staring at the carpet and managed to hold it together.
“Can you just shut it off?” I asked Nicky. I hoped my voice was a little less angry and powerful as Laverne’s, but I was so mad at this point, I wasn’t sure.
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