Discipline and Reward
A Love Story
Disclaimer: Standard “free porn” disclaimers apply. If you are too young, or don’t like pr0n, or just aren’t into my kinks ... go away.
Copyright Notice: © 2013-2017 Baltimore Rogers (balrog0517@hotmail.com) All rights reserved; this story is not to be reproduced in any form for profit without the express written permission of the author. This story may be freely circulated only in its entirety and with this notice attached.
Chapter 12. In which pressure takes its toll
Time flew by for Cindi in Themiscyra. Days were spent with her mother exploring the limits of each other’s secrets. Cindi learned more than she had ever imagined there was to know about the early history of the Amazons. But she never found out that Hippolyta’s fondest desire in life was to run off and find her lost love.
Hippolyta learned of her daughter’s first love, separated from her almost immediately by an ocean and the better part of two continents, killed just scant weeks later before she ever saw him again. But she never learned more about her daughter’s mysterious new God-slash-Lover.
They exchanged story upon story of victory, of defeat, of survival, of fallen comrades. They learned how alike and how different they were, both in ways they never would have imagined.
Evenings were spent with Kalliope and other friends, reliving century after century of grand adventure and little mundane jokes that only they understood. Even so, ever-perceptive Kalliope began to suspect that her offhand comment that first night had hit the mark. Her beautiful, smart, passionate, courageous friend was saying goodbye—to her friends, to her mother, to the Queendom of Themiscyra itself.
At “night” Cindi spent mornings and early afternoons with me, pushing the limits of taboos and exploring the depths of her submission.
Scene:
She was eating her lunch from a plate on the floor, naked in a posh restaurant, of which there were several in my twelve block “clothing optional” zone. Other patrons were shocked, not necessarily by the nudity—people other than Cindi could and did come here naked sometimes—but by her wantonness.
With her head down in her plate on the floor and her ass pressing against my side, she sighed, moaned, squealed whenever I touched her. Women, and some men, were livid and embarrassed. Other men, and some women, were aroused and unable to take their eyes off of us. Cindi was putting on a show, hoping I would reward her performance. Later I did.
Scene:
I brought Cindi to the gym—naked, collared, and leashed, of course; the gym was within my twelve blocks—and introduced her to the three guys, all “Ten Thousanders”, with whom I/Greg played basketball most days after work.
Instead of our usual two-on-two, I suggested a game of H-O-R-S-E, with Cindi as the prize for the winner. To make it more interesting I added the rule that Cindi would grant the winner up to five “wishes” with one less wish for each letter the winner had accrued. I played to lose of course. The point was for her to be a party favor for someone else.
For her part, Cindi got creative. She knelt and sat back against the wall behind the hoop doing her best to distract the shooter. Whenever one of the guys missed a shot, Cindi rose up on her knees, cupped her breasts, tweaked her nipples, and moaned loudly.
After about an hour, the winner, Julia’s husband Fred, claimed his prize with a score of H-O-R. He and Cindi disappeared and came back almost two hours later, both disheveled with broad satisfied grins, having put his two wishes to very good use. Cindi walked home heeling behind me with someone else’s cum dribbling down her chin and chest.
Scene:
Cindi was the “hostess of honor” at a nyotaimori luncheon for Western Australia’s wealthy and powerful. Chopsticks played across her body. Sushi disappeared revealing the skin beneath. Cindi remained perfectly still except for facial expressions, all of which reflected respect, desire, happiness.
This stillness became difficult when the sushi was gone and the men and women amused themselves by applying the chopsticks to her directly, but she persevered. She visibly warmed when she saw me nodding and smiling at her.
After the party was over, the sushi chef, a minor celebrity in his profession, took part of his payment in services, which Cindi happily rendered, still unmoving except for head and mouth.
Every degradation met with smiling approval and “good girl” affirmations from me. These expressions were at variance with my actual feelings though, to say the least. For example, at the gym I had been annoyed with Cindi’s happiness at “meeting my friends”, her ready willingness to play the whore for them.
And when the sushi chef had been fucking Cindi’s face my stomach was churning. At one point when he paused overlong with his member fully thrust down her throat, I seeded him loudly, in Japanese, with his mother’s voice, «“Let the poor girl breathe!“». He looked around startled, maybe even a bit frightened, and pulled back.
On the walk home I had been torn up about what he ... what I had done to her, but Cindi saw none of that.
Through all this Greg’s body seemed to be coming down with something. One day during Cindi’s “Themiscyra” time I had a doctor come over. Yes, doctors still made house calls ... for billionaires. His diagnosis: “stress”.
I was livid. ”That’s the best you can do?“
“Mr. Wolfe,” he replied, calmly, evenly, “I’m very good at what I do, otherwise I would not be here now. I know what I’m talking about. Something has you so keyed up that your body is rebelling. If you know what it is, you need to deal with it. If you don’t know what it is, you need to figure it out, and deal with it. In the latter case, I can refer you to some excellent psychiatric experts, but I suspect the same person who found me could give you as good a list, if not a better one.”
I calmed myself, thanked him, and showed him out.
On the morning of the fifth day of Cindi’s Themiscyra vacation Cindi and Hippolyta were having a late breakfast and planning their day. Then she heard, in her room, buried in her rucksack, the unmistakable sound of the LoH communicator’s emergency beacon. Hippolyta was surprised when her daughter stopped talking in mid-sentence and ran upstairs.
When she returned she was wearing her Majestic Woman togs, now minus the crown, of course.
“It’s an ‘all hands’ alert, Mother.”
“But you’re on leave. Surely they won’t miss—”
“Mother ... In the history of the Legion there have only been three all hands alerts.”
“Well, Kynthia, this could be the first without you.”
“Two of those were alien invasions.”
“But that doesn’t mean—”
“We’re expecting an alien invasion, the first one we’ve ever anticipated.”
“Even so, that doesn’t mean you have—”
“I wrote the defense plan. They’re all counting on me.”
“Go,” said Hippolyta, exasperated, flummoxed, but somewhere under it all, proud, “I’ll be here when you are done.”
Then something changed on Hippolyta’s face. Pride had risen to the surface. She hurried across the room. She grabbed her daughter in a fierce hug. “I love you, Daughter of Heracles.”
Tears suddenly welling in her eyes, Cindi responded, “I love you, My True Queen.“
And with that Cindi was gone. She picked a random direction and flew at top speed for about ten minutes. She was obscuring the location of Themiscyra from the LoH.
During that flight time she tried to pump me for information, but I reminded her of Blake’s “demonstration” a few days ago.
«“Think how suspicious it would have been if you had been expecting it. I can’t tell you what it is. But I can tell you that it’s a matter of life and death, every bit deserving of an all hands alert.“»
Her locator turned itself on. She was the only LoH member with an “off” switch for her communicator’s locator function, and it only worked within a two-hundred-mile radius of Athens; it had been her negotiated condition for accepting the thing in the first place.
As soon as the locator came completely online she signalled for pickup.
The familiar tingle of the teleporter gave way to the unfamiliar sight of the main concourse of Spyglass packed wall-to-wall with heroes. Catching Blake’s eye across the impassable room, Cindi mouthed a silent question, “Betelgeuse?” Blake frowned slightly and shook his head “No”.
Cindi watched as he turned his head to the extremely agitated gesticulating hero standing next to him. It was Power Man. Even her hearing couldn’t make out what they were saying over the general murmur of two hundred voices. But even without hearing them, what she could see of them told a story.
She had never seen Claud this upset before and with good reason. Life had taught the Rheonian superhero to keep a tight rein on his emotions. People got hurt when he lost control.
Cindi could relate. She remembered her own early days at the secret government research center in the Arizona desert.
War Department, Washington, DC, May 8, 1941
It had been weeks since she had first made her pitch to that British air Marshal to join in the fight against the Nazis, and yet she was further from the front lines than ever. These “Americans” weren’t even in the war yet, but here she was separated from the action by an entire ocean. It made her furious. She had done everything they asked of her.
First she had gone to Allied Command in London, far from the front lines. She had to give them the same demonstration that she had given Prestridge in Crete. When they were finally satisfied with her bona fides, they sent her all the way across the Atlantic ... to the cowardly Americans who hadn’t even joined the fight!
It turned out that the disdain was mutual. When they had interrogated her about the source of her powers, they openly scoffed at the truth!
“Look honey,” the chief interrogator had finally said, “You don’t have to make up some nutso story about Greek Gods. If you don’t want to tell us how you got this way, don’t tell us.”
She nearly killed the man, but the Compassion of Aphrodite ultimately saved him. Holding him in the air by his throat, she decided that ignorance, even invincible ignorance, was not a capital offense. She dropped him and let him scurry away. She let him live. Hours later, when an older, gray-haired man entered the room, he seemed more ... respectful.
“Look Miss ... Kynthia. We really don’t know what to do with you. The Brits are in the middle of the fight of their lives and so they don’t have the time and the resources to study a, uh, phenomenon like you. They are proposing,” he waved the envelope holding Prestridge’s Project: Majestic letter, “that we study you to see if we can replicate your powers in regular troops.“
Kynthia began to shake her head.
“Now, now, ma’am, just hear me out. You alone would be an incredible help to the war effort, but imagine the impact that ten of you would have! A Hundred! A Thousand!”
Wearily Kynthia responded, “Look, Mister—”
“Colonel, uh, Colonel Johnson”
“—Colonel Johnson, you just don’t understand—”
“Please, ma’am, just give us a chance. Our egghead types are doing some amazing, magical things. I talked to a team in New Mexico the other day that thinks they can turn a radioactive pile into a bomb that could wipe out a whole city! Who is to say that they can’t reverse engineer whatever science ... or ... or-or magic these, um, ‘Gods’ used on you, and turn it into something that could benefit the whole army? C’mon, yes, I admit it’s a one-in-a-million shot, but if we did it, wouldn’t that be better than having just one wom- of-of-of you?”
Ignoring the typical male smugness that he was trying so hard to suppress, she had to admit he was right. She had seen first-hand how science had transformed the world in the last two hundred or so years. She had to admit that she would not be terribly surprised if their scientists could figure out how to mass-produce her Gods-Gifted powers like so many automobiles. She agreed to give it a chance, on the promise that if they hadn’t made any progress in six months they would ask Britain to give her some kind of sanction to fight within the Allied command structure.
Project Majestic, Arizona, May 17, 1941, and after
So, there she was at some secret US Government research facility in some Gods-forsaken place called “Arizona”. Actually, the place had kind of grown on her, the desert had a kind of rugged, austere beauty that was different than the Arabian and African deserts she was more familiar with. She even had a kind of grudging respect for the “eggheads” who treated her like some sort of lab rat. Truth to tell she had learned a great deal about her new powers from their methodical probing. But she yearned to get back to Europe, to join in the fight.
Not long after she arrived, news came down that Crete was under siege. She pressed the military heads of the science base for information about Crete, and about her lover, Simon Tremaine. After another two weeks, well after the Nazis had overrun the island. Kynthia finally got word about Simon. Apparently when Nazi paratroopers landed in the infirmary compound, Simon, in hospital pajamas, had taken up a rifle and a helmet from a dead soldier and fought off the devils until he ran out of ammo. They had rushed his position and killed him immediately.
Kynthia had reacted not with mourning, but with rage. She should have been out there, fighting the Nazis, defending beleaguered Europe, saving lives. But she was thinking about one life in particular. One life that she would never see again.
It had been about three AM the next night, the night after she had received word of Simon’s death. It was during the umpteenth retry of a test to measure her night vision. Stupid things kept going wrong with the test. They had been at it for hours, no closer to getting the data they wanted than they were at the start.
Once again something went wrong with the measuring apparatus. Kynthia lost control. She broke an innocent researcher’s jaw. After that she was labeled a “hormonal woman” and a “loose cannon”, and that was just in the official reports. It took another five months of patient bridge-building on her part, and corresponding failure on the part of the researchers, before they allowed her into combat.
Well, the attack on Pearl Harbor helped move things along too.
«That night when I lost control I must have looked just like Claud does now.»
Blake put a hand on Claud’s shoulder, but Claud shrugged it off with enough force to make Blake’s hand seem to leap back.
«Time for Majestic Woman to step up.»
She flew slowly over the crowd and alighted next to the pair.
“... Four days, Blake. It’s been four days!“
“Claud, were gonna find her. But we need time and clear heads to do it.“
Cindi interrupted, “I don’t think he’s trying to help at all, Claud. I brought that can of whoop-ass that I was saving up for you. Maybe we should open it up together on Blake?”
Claud rounded on her with wild eyes and gritted teeth, and, seeing her sardonic “Church Lady” smirk, suddenly burst out laughing. Blake and Cynthia gathered their friend into a hug as the big man’s laughter turned to helpless tears.
Cindi stage-whispered, “Somebody wanna tell me what’s going on here?”
Claud pointed to Blake. In his best “Just the facts, ma’am” voice, Blake began, “Powerhouse is missing. Sadie was last seen by her roommate at Cornell Friday morning before classes. She was supposed to meet Claud for dinner Friday evening in Cosmopolis, but never showed. They had had some ... heated moments of late, and she,” he glanced at Claud, “she was ‘feeling her oats’ lately, being away from home for the first time since the Wilsons adopted her. So Claud just assumed she had stood him up. He was annoyed,” another glance, “but put it out of his mind.”
“Sadie’s mother tried to contact Sadie’s roommate Monday morning, after Sadie missed the family’s regular Sunday evening call and wasn’t answering her phone. Sadie’s roommate, Carol, finally called back late Monday evening. Sadie’s cell phone had been in the charger on her desk all weekend and all day Monday. Her bed was made and hadn’t been touched all weekend. Carol said, rather indelicately, to Mrs. Wilson, ‘Sadie really likes rush parties. I just assumed she had met a guy.’ The Wilsons asked Carol if she knew any students who were in any of Sadie’s classes. Carol checked around the dorm. She called the Wilsons an hour later, now worried herself because Sadie had missed all her classes. Sadie never missed class. That was when the Wilsons contacted the police ... and Claud. And that brings us all here.“
A last look at Claud, who nodded back.
“So,” Cindi recapped, “the second most powerful person on the face of the Earth has been missing for four days. Call me an idiot, but what about her locator?”
Claud fielded this one. “In her dorm room in Ithaca, in the bottom of her sock drawer. That’s what we fought about the last time I saw her. She never did learn how to adjust the communicator volume settings. One day it went off in her English class, loudly. It embarrassed her, all the more so because the professor made a big deal about it. She’s been leaving it in her room ever since.
“She said she doesn’t mean to leave it behind when she’s in uniform, but she’s gotten out of the habit of carrying it, and she forgets. She said,” Claud paused, gathering himself, “She said she didn’t see what the big deal was, and she wished I would ‘get off her back’ about it.”
Cindi tried her best now to ignore his struggle to keep his cool; he was clearly winning. She probed further, “So was she wearing her uniform?“
The two men looked at each other. Blake said, “I teleported in before the police got there. I picked up the communicator and did a fairly thorough search. The uniform is not there.”
“So she was probably—”
Blake interrupted, “—wearing her uniform and en route to Cosmopolis when it happened. Or someone knew who she was and kidnapped her from her room with rheanite and stole her uniform too. Or she took a side trip somewhere and got into trouble there. But I agree that the line between Ithaca and Cosmopolis is the first place to look. Almost six hundred miles with Carthage City right in the middle of the flyover route.“
“Shit.” Carthage City, Motown, Blake’s hometown, was easily the biggest criminal cesspool in the entire USA. If she had gotten into trouble there ...
“All caught up now?” he asked.
“Yes, but what are we going to tell them?” she said, gesturing to the assembled hundreds of the LoH.
“That’s what Claud and I were, um, discussing when you joined in. Thanks for your, ah, help, by the way. We both needed it. Claud, are you ready to let me handle this?”
Power Man nodded his assent. The Wraith turned to address the assembled Legion. The simulation of Majestic Woman that my Cindi inhabited silently reached out to her Lord.
«My Lord? Can you help?»
«“I’m trying, baby bitch, but it’s not gonna be quick, and it’s not gonna be easy. Do you have any idea how many millions of people, of minds, there are between to Ithaca, New York and Cosmopolis, Illinois?“»
«So you don’t stay ... connected to other heroes? Only me?»
She actually had a rush of warm feeling at that thought, that she was special to me. Well, she was, but only because of my plan, right? I certainly didn’t want to encourage this “love” obsession of hers. So I was not sure how much I should reveal to her. Luckily, in this case, it was easy to tell the truth without having to tell the whole truth.
You see, Rheonians are not human. In general I can’t read them. Or track them. Or swap with them. Believe me, I have tried everything. If you were me wouldn’t you want to swap bodies with “The Most Powerful Man on Earth”? Even if only to see what it feels like? But therein lies the problem. Power Man is actually not enough “Man” for my powers to work well on him, and the same applies to Powerhouse.
I was not completely shut out. Rheonian thoughts tied to strong emotions were not hard for me to see. When Claud had been about to launch Blake into a different orbit a few minutes ago I was reading him loud and clear. Now I could barely tell he was there.
In any case, to find Powerhouse I would need some serious luck. Like noticing a mind communicating with a mind I couldn’t sense. Or noticing someone thinking about the fact that they had kidnapped her. Or ... something. Maybe now that the police were involved I could find the last person who had seen her on Friday through them. Maybe someone had seen her in the air. Something.
So what could I tell my adoring slave who was expecting me to work a miracle to find her friend?
«“Look, Cindi. Remember how Themiscyra was too hard for me to enter alone, but we made it through together?“»
«Yes ...»
«“Well, aliens, like the Rheonians, are hard for me in a different way. That doesn’t make it impossible for me to find her. It just makes it harder. You can help me by thinking of regular humans that would have been likely to see her on Friday.“»
Her response was so immediate it startled me. «Air traffic controllers, My Lord. They might have seen her on radar.»
«“What? Bodies don’t reflect radar. Oooooooh! Human bodies don’t reflect radar. Rheonian bodies probably reflect everything in the electromagnetic spectrum.“»
«Well, not everything, My Lord, but close enough. Claud has told me many times that he prefers to fly outside the atmosphere if he has to travel very far, because otherwise countries tend to scramble fighters after him when he pops up on their radar.»
«“That’s fantastic. We can work with that. Good girl, Cindi.“»
«Good girl. Reward!»
«Um, thank you, My Lord, but if you want me to stay in character you might want to avoid that phrase. Now would not be an appropriate time for Majestic Woman to be visibly aroused.»
«“Um, I think you’ll be fine, babydoll, but I’ll be more careful.“»
«Thank you, My Lord.»
Now I was finding and probing the minds of ATCs that cover the Great Lakes region. Jack-fucking-pot.
Canadian border-watching ATCs had seen a small, fast, low-flying blip, not matching any flight plan, over Lake Ontario, three Fridays in a row. The first time they saw it going westward across the lake shortly after six pm, then back eastward at around midnight.
When the same thing happened the next Friday at six, they were ready for the return trip, even though the eastbound return blip appeared at eight-thirty this time instead of midnight.
They scrambled interceptors after the bogey and discovered that it was Powerhouse. She had seemed lost in her thoughts until she noticed the planes. When she did see them, she smiled and blew kisses at the pilots then shot away from them much faster than they could follow.
The third week they noted her westward journey across the lake again. Once again shortly after 6. This time they let her pass without sending fighters. That third Friday was last Friday, the day she had gone missing. There was, needless to say, no return trip.
So she had made it at least as far as Carthage City. No ATCs monitoring the American parts of the flight path noticed anything though, not on any of the three Fridays. For me the trail went cold there. Time to turn this over to the professionals.
«“I hit the jackpot, baby bitch, but we have to make this look natural. I’m going to give this to Blake, but we want him to think it was his idea, okay? Let me handle that.“»
«Yes, My Lord.»
Now I was seeding Blake with the air traffic controller idea. He stumbled a bit in mid-speech, but recovered. He had been finishing up anyway.
“... It is even possible that she decided that she no longer wants any of ... this,” Blake said, waving his hands expansively as if to encompass the whole Legion. “And just left it all behind. But that’s not the way we should bet. So we will be vigilant. We will be thorough. We will do everything we can to find her. However, we will not tear up half of the North American continent in the process. We’re the good guys. Never forget it. That is all.“
Everyone was gone except the duty officer, the Wraith, Magic Lamp, and Majestic Woman. Blake had already talked to the Canadians. He asked better questions than I’d thought of in my probing. He got better answers. He really was an incredibly good detective. But ultimately he hit the same brick wall that I had. The trail ended at Carthage City.
“Guys, what we could really use now is some magic,” looking at Cindi, “or some technology indistinguishable from magic,” looking at Hamish MacLean, the 4th human Magic Lamp.
Hamish spoke up first, “The Uenans never get involved in intra-planetary affairs. The only reason they have helped the Legion as much as they did was that they thought my predecessors were spending too much time patrolling Earth and not enough time patrolling their assigned sector of the galaxy. But I’ll ask. The fact that she could possibly destabilize the whole sector if she were corrupted may help.”
Cindi’s turn. “Blake ... you know my Gods don’t work like that. The last time they appeared to me was when they made me into this,” she gestured, sweeping her hands downward from her shoulders, framing her luscious body. The men couldn’t help but take a long, appraising look. As Majestic Woman she was a bit peeved, but she had to admit she invited it.
She continued, “I pray to my Gods for help and strength constantly. I have done so several times since I received the emergency call. I have prayed to them while we were all assembled here.” She had. I almost always let her prayers pass unnoticed. I was not ready to challenge her beliefs yet.
“I came to the conclusion long ago that they took all the direct action with me that they ever intended to take on that night in Themiscyra.” «But my new God answers my prayers immediately!»
Blake must have noticed something in her expression. “Do you have any other resources that might be helpful here.” He was thinking about Majestic Woman’s mysterious new lover. He was thinking about how Majestic Woman found every victim in that apartment fire so unerringly. Damn, he was good.
And then it hit me. The intuitive leaps, the nearly superhuman deductive skills, the keen observations: how he noticed the things no one else noticed. He was a god damned genius! Shit!
I should probably explain that reaction just a little bit. I have a sort of love-hate relationship with human genius. I’m fascinated by geniuses. Who wouldn’t be? I love to get into their heads to see what makes them tick. I love the amazing ideas they come up with. I love the surprising, sometimes shocking intuitive leaps they make. I love the wonderful arts and inventions they create.
Unfortunately they can also be quite maddening as well. Case in point: Isaac Newton. Brilliant, brilliant man, but for years a source of nothing but vexation and frustration to me. He totally escaped my notice until 1685, when he published a little tome called Principia Mathematica, in which he singlehandedly invented both calculus and physics.
I had to see what was going on inside that head. When I found him, I was shocked. I had expected to find a bookish, shy man, with his head full of esoterica about planets and motion and numbers. What I found was a paranoid Machiavellian of the first order.
He was consumed with plots and intrigues, with the idea, not entirely baseless, that others wanted to steal his secret knowledge. My God, he was a fucking alchemist! How had this happened? Over the course of several months I probed deeper in his mind.
As it turned out, most of the genius that shocked the world in the Principia was old hat to him, things he had worked out in his college days. He had only released the book at all to throw the rest of the burgeoning scientific community off of the trail of his real work.
“His real work,” you say? You want to know what the man who discovered the sheet music for the Harmony of the Spheres wanted to do for an encore? He was after ... no kidding ... the meaning of life, or, more precisely, the mechanics of life. In much the same way that he had tied the motions of the planets to the simple idea that “things fall”, he had made the amazing intuitive leap between the mystery of life and “alchemical” chemical transformations.
It truly was an amazing insight, but there was a problem. I had the perspective to see that the relationship between life and chemistry had to be much, much more complicated than that between heavenly bodies and gravity. Newton had begun a truly hopeless task. I knew he would never make headway in this research for the rest of his life.
So I tried, foolishly, to redirect him back to math, back to physics. It was a disaster. Every seed that I tried to plant, however subtle, he rooted out and killed. He came to believe that some evil spirit was trying to turn him away from his research. Heh, true enough, I guess. This sense he had that someone was meddling with his head caused him to dig in his heels and resist even his own natural interest in physical science. My every attempt to turn him away from fruitless research and toward fruitful research backfired and blew up in my face. I was utterly stymied by his perceptiveness, by his keen self-awareness, by his ... genius.
Eventually I gave up.
So now I looked at Blake Warren with new eyes. I saw the Isaac Newton of criminology (knowing full well that Newton was no slouch at that either). I saw a man too smart for his own good.
«“Send him away, baby bitch. Slam the door. Hard.“»
«Will do, My Lord.»
“No, Blake,” she said, “I don’t know anyone with clairvoyance or,” a comically wide-eyed expression crossed her face, “mysteeerious psychic brain powers. Well, except possibly my Patron Gods. And again, they don’t come when I call. Rather the opposite.”
He laughed. Her silliness was infectious. “You’re pretty skeptical for someone who can fly. Well then, I guess we’re done here. Cynthia, you and Claud know what you need to do. I expect you to coordinate with each other. And ... keep an eye on Claud. Please.”
“Of course, Blake. I will. I know how he feels, believe me. I’ll be there for him.”
We were back in Themiscyra. Kynthia was packing her things while she talked to Hippolyta.
“So it wasn’t the invasion.”
“No, Mamá. Sadie is missing.”
“Oh, no!”
Hippolyta knew Sadie. Several years ago the Magic Lamp Corps had discovered her, another survivor of the Rheonian Holocaust. Her malfunctioning rescue capsule had been drifting in space; she was still in stasis. They eventually got her to Earth and to Claud.
Unlike Claud, who was an infant at the time of his civilization’s suicide, Sadie had been equivalent to twelve “Earth years” old. And before turning on her stasis unit, she had watched in horror as every person, every place, every thing she had ever known was destroyed.
Needless to say, when she was released from stasis she was an emotional wreck. An emotional wreck with unearthly power. Claud did everything he could for her, but she was inconsolable, and, well, out of control. Bouts of listless, heavy sadness were interspersed with fits of rage that could—and sometimes did—level buildings.
Besides that, there was just no plausible way for Claud, the young single librarian, to keep a twelve-year-old girl in his home permanently. So Kynthia had suggested that Sadie spend some time in Themiscyra. The Amazons were quite expert at helping traumatized girls become empowered women. Claud agreed.
Sadie thrived in Themiscyra. Every single one of the Amazons understood unbearable pain, and yet they were so strong. They helped her learn to cope, to stand, to find joy, to imagine a worthwhile future.
The day finally came when Sadie was ready to face her new world, the world Claud lived in. Claud had found a family to adopt her, his own aunt and uncle—his own adoptive father’s sister and brother-in-law—in Wyoming. The day she left Themiscyra, Sadie had cried her farewell in Hippolyta’s arms. This was more to Hippolyta than just a friend of her daughter in trouble. This was a disaster befalling someone who was herself like another daughter to Hippolyta!
“What can we do to help?”
“What, Mamá?”
“They were all words of one syllable, Kynthia. We seventy-five thousand Amazons stand ready to do whatever we can to rescue one of our own. What can we do?”
“Well, I hardly think that thousands of Amazons invading Michigan will help much, Mother.”
“Then what will? My best military strategist has been unavailable for the last seventy-two years,” the queen said with a smirk, but with warmth in her eyes. “Things have gone downhill a bit.”
“Mamá!” Kynthia blushed at the rare compliment, but kept her train of thought on track. “Well, to start with, let’s think more ’detective’ and less ’military’.“
“Fine. Five of us are currently on detached duty working for Interpol. Should I have them come in? They can be here by this evening.”
“Have them contact the Wraith via the Spyglass orbital tower. Have them identify themselves as, um, ‘Sisters of Sadie’. I’ll make sure he is expecting them.”
Hippolyta was skeptical. “This ‘Wraith’ ... is ... a man?”
Kynthia laughed. “You need to get out more, Mamá. Yes, he’s a man. One of the finest men in the world.”
“It will have to do. Is there anything else? Anything at all?”
“I can’t think of anything. I’ll be spending my days scouring her flight path for clues. Pray for me, Mamá.”
“Always, Kynthia. Always.”
Kynthia donned her field pack and flew away. Again she picked a random direction. Again she flew until she heard her communicator warning beep telling her that the locator had switched on. Again she called Spyglass for pickup.
Claud, Blake, and “Cynthia” sat down to plan out an initial search pattern. Cindi and Claud, both with super-eyesight and the ability to fly, would be responsible for primary search along the flight path. Others would do on-the-ground follow up for items of interest the “flyers” pointed out. But now, Blake and Claud needed to rest. They all teleported to their respective homes.
Cindi dropped her baggage in her laundry room. She now had a 10-hour time shift to absorb with no preparation. She didn’t want to try to stay up all night to “reset her clock”. Not when she needed to be her best for the first day of the search. So, she wrote a note to Annette apologizing in advance for drugging her. She dropped the Shield of Athena. She took a fairly potent sleeping pill. She curled up in the doggy bed. She went to meet her Lord.