“Gadget!” cried Zoë, yanking the Dr. Manhatten Helmet off of his head as he nearly went toppling off of the bed, sucking in a deep gasp of air as he did so, his eyes wide.

“Whoa!” he cried out, nearly losing his balance. He caught himself just in time before he went tumbling to the floor and steadied himself. “What the hell!” He felt covered in sweat, and his heart was beating a million miles an hour. He looked around. Zoë was sitting there next to him, holding the Dr. Manhatten Helmet, and Misto was sitting behind him, a worried look on his blue-furred, wolfen features. The room was dark and dim. Nobody else was there. “How long . . .” he panted. “How long was I . . . ?”

“An hour,” said Zoë. “And you talked, while you were . . . wherever you were. Did you find out? Where Ravenkroft is?”

“Oh yeah,” said Gadget. He swallowed the fear he felt. His stomach went queasy as he remembered what Viktor had said. “And a lot more, too.”

“Well, like what?” asked Misto.

“Like what he plans on doing with Dizzy,” said Gadget, “and what it could mean for us. For all of us, if we don’t stop him.”

He sucked in a breath, and then explained everything he had seen and heard while using the Helm, in detail, down to the last blow he had struck during the fight with Ravenkroft on Planet Vulcan. And what Viktor had told him in the TARDIS. All that he had seen and heard. When he had finished, Zoë had an ashen look on her face and Misto’s brow was furrowed in concern.

“Well now,” said the wolfen man-beast at last. “This is some anus. How do we know we can trust what Viktor said?”

“I think . . . we can,” said Zoë, shaking her head. “Think about it. He has no incentive to lie to anyone.”

“But he also might be stark raving bug-fuck insane,” said Misto. “He’s trapped inside some kind of weird psychic construct, inside Ravenkroft’s mind, and Ravenkroft has gone and merged himself with this alien! Who knows what the hell is going on inside his brain!”

“Well he sounded pretty sensible,” said Gadget. “Pretty coherent. And what he said tracks with what I scanned from Ravenkroft when I read his . . . and the alien’s . . . thoughts while he had Dizzy. It all lines up.”

“So what do we do about it?” said Zoë. “It’s just the three of us. What good can we do? We’re not freaking superheroes.”

Gadget blinked. “Aren’t we though?” he said, cocking his head, and looking at her. She really was pretty, in the glow of the table lamp. Stop it, he told himself. Stop it right now. (What’s the matter, whispered the Beast. Afraid of your own longings?) He cleared his throat and got on with what he wanted to say. “I mean, seriously. Look at us. We’re sitting here, the three of us . . . a guy who can control matter and energy with his mind, and can read thoughts, and can — well, I guess — freaking astral project — and a girl who can set fire to the whole place, and anything she looks at cross-eyed, just by getting angry at it. And a seven-foot-tall, blue-furred werewolf who could probably lift a city bus and not break a sweat. Right, Misto? Think about it. If we’re not the superheroes — if we’re not the frigging Avengers come leaping off the comic book page — then who the hell is?”

Zoë appeared to think this over. “I guess you’re right,” she said. She didn’t sound entirely comfortable with the concept, though. But Misto was right. They had to rescue Dizzy. And if Mystikite didn't want to help, well, fuck him. Goddamn it . . . why did he have to leave like that?

No one likes you, that’s why, whispered the Beast. And if you go up against that monster, you’ll fail. You’ll die. Like you almost just died a few minutes ago. You can’t win this.

“My boy,” said Misto, “your skills at logical argument are supreme. But I need no convincing. I would go after Dizzy anyway, alone if need be. The two of you are welcome to accompany me, of course.”

Go on, take the coward’s way out, said the Beast. Back down now. It’s your only chance. Besides, it’s what you’re good at.

Gadget clenched his fists. No. I want to save Dizzy.

“What we need,” said Zoë, leaning forward, “is a plan. And weapons. We need more than just fire and psionic attacks. We saw how much good that did against Ravenkroft and his . . . Cyber-bio-zombie — ”

“I call ‘em the Teenage Mutant Cybermechazoid Samurai,” said Gadget.

“Hey, that’s cute,” said Zoë. She smiled. “I like that. It’s a mouthful, but it’s catchy. But — anyway — like I said. We’ll need more than just your Helm and my pyrokinetic powers if we’re gonna go up against them. We’ve got the Disruptophazers. Mystikite . . .” She furrowed her brow and visibly steeled herself against the tears, forcing them back. “Mystikite left his here. So we’ve got two of those. But we’ll probably need something a lot heftier than that if we’re going to go up against an army of those . . . things. The trouble is we don’t have anything else. If only — ”

“Perhaps,” said Misto, smiling a (literally) wolfish grin, “I can assist in that department.” He rose from where he sat and limped over to the large, two-meter-tall, black steamer trunk that dominated the center of the room, the one that reminded Gadget of a portable metal sarcophagus and that had large motorized hinges across the seams. Misto pressed his thumb to the fingerprint scanner — Gadget supposed his transformation didn’t affect his fingerprints — mounted midway up the side of the trunk and the motors on the hinges spun and whirred to life. The sarcophagus split in two and swung open, revealing its contents: Four rows of what sure as hell looked like deadly-ass, ray-gun-like weapons on one side, and on the other, a weird addition to the mix: A vintage, cherry red B.C. Rich Warlock guitar, outfitted with a cornucopia of densely-packed green circuit boards, brightly-colored ribbon cables, clockwork gears and wheels and levers, vacuum tubes like those on his Helm, three old-fashioned electrical gauges, and long, thin neon tubes on either side of the neck. The strings and pickups both shined like silver or chrome, as did the whammy-bar. It had a series of quarter-inch audio cables curled up and racked next to it, and below it, stowed away, a small BOSS Katana guitar amp.

“What the hell is that?” asked Zoë.

“That,” said Misto, “is Dizzy’s Electro-Mesmiric, Meta-Metalizing Guitar. It’s an unfinished project of hers. It relates to music, string theory, higher dimensions, and Dizzy’s idea that the entire universe might literally just be one big mathematical construct . . . one that, at its core, works off of Pythagorean musical ratios . . . and because that’s how the Tesseract Reactor works. That’s what she thinks its secret is. She’s convinced that if she can couple the musical frequencies from the guitar to a powerful enough Psi-force-field, she can drive the Tesseract Reactor. Hence why she was interested in your Helm, Gadget. But, anyway. Weapons. Tools.”

“What’s this thing?” Asked Gadget, picking up one of the gizmos from the top shelf of the trunk. It looked like a laser pointer, only thicker, with a small digital display on one side and a series of small buttons on the other, its tip a series of what looked like tiny LEDs, coils, antennae, and photo-strobes.

“That,” said Misto, “is a Photonic Screwdriver. Yeah, yeah, I know. Cue the Who references. But really, it’s cool. And yes, it’s a multipurpose tool. Opens locked doors, turns on lights and switches . . . scrambles digital circuits, scrambles analog circuits, reroutes electrical flows, reverses polarities, magnetic poles, undoes molecular bonds, fuses molecular bonds . . . Does just about everything. In fact it does too much stuff. It’s a little unpredictable. Well, I say a little. I mean a lot. It only works on small scales, though. And it also functions as a Neuralyser. Meaning it can make whoever you point it at — if you press the right button — forget everything that just happened in the past ninety seconds. However, that function has a recharge time of . . . ninety seconds. Meaning you can’t blast somebody with it more than once in the space of time of it’s effectiveness. And hey, it’s also environmentally-friendly: It runs on a single triple-A battery.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“Annd now it’s mine,” said Gadget, picking up the device and examining it.

“You sure about that?” said Misto. “It won’t work inside those force-fields you generate, plus, I did just say it was unstable.”

“Well, define unstable,” said Gadget.

“At any given moment, there’s a chance that while using it, all life as you know it could stop instantaneously, and every molecule in your body could explode at the speed of light.”

“Yeah-yeah,” said Gadget. “Total protonic reversal. I’ve seen Ghostbusters a thousand times.”

“No no, I really mean that,” said Misto. “Scout’s Honor. That could happen.”

“Uh, oh . . . okay,” said Gadget. He almost put it back. Almost. Nah. For real, how many times in his life would he ever have the opportunity to go around waving one of these in the face of a villain, and saving the day in swashbuckling, Time-Lordian fashion? Besides, what was the worst that could happen? Well, okay, he could die a horrible death. There was that. But even if he did undergo “total protonic reversal,” to quote the great Ray Stanz, he wouldn’t even feel it. Right? Well, he hoped he wouldn’t. Then again, he supposed Zoë would miss him. And his mom. And Mystikite. And there’d be a substantially reduced probability of them rescuing Dizzy if they were minus one man and plus one big pile of cosmic dust.

Come on, whispered the beast. Are you kidding? They don’t need your help. Hell, it’d be a good thing for the mission if you got yourself vaporized. You wouldn’t be in anybody’s way that way. Least of all your friend Mystikite. Who, remember, left rather than be around you.

Gadget screwed up his nerve and pocketed the Photonic Screwdriver anyway. You never knew when you might need a door unlocked. Or a light-switch flicked from across the room, right? Right.

“What about these?” asked Zoë. She picked up, from off of the second shelf, what looked like something that belonged on a suit of medieval armor. A part of a pair of somethings, actually: One half of a pair of vambraces — large, curvaceous braces that fit around a person’s forearms, only out fitted with coils of wire and lots of old-fashioned, solid-state circuitry and ringed with batteries and small vacuum tubes. And in the center of each one, near where the wrists were crossed, two contact plates mounted on tightly-coiled springs, with thick bundles of electrical cables leading into them.

Zoë picked up one of the vambrace and looked it over. “What the hell do these do?”

She took off her long brown duster, and laid it on the bed. She slid the vambrace over her bare left forearm, and uttered a small scream as it suddenly came to life — the vacuum tubes lit up a bright orange, and electrical arcs leapt from the electrodes in the rear to the contact plate — and the vambrace quickly snapped closed, locking into place and tightening itself to fit her snugly. “Whoa!” she exclaimed. “What the hell!”

“Oh yeah,” said Misto. “Probably should’ve warned you about those. Sorry. Those are Dizzy’s Repulsivator Vambraces. Basically they’re a gravity weapon. You put them on, and then hold up your wrists, like this — ” He held up his wrists in front of him, criss-crossed with one another, “and then slam them together, like this — ” He lifted one out from the other, and then connected his two wrists, “and voilà, you’ve just generated a gravitic pulse-wave strong enough to knock down an approaching enemy . . . or a wall or two. It’s iffy.”

“You could’ve just said, ‘What Wonder Woman’s bracelets do,’” said Zoë.

“Oh, yeah,” said Misto. “Guess I could’ve. But fair warning, these are, also, unstable. And they have a recharge period of a minute or so. So be mindful of that.”

“I’m sensing a theme here,” said Zoë, shaking her head. “How do I get them off?”

“There’s a release button on the back edge,” said Misto. “Sometimes it works.”

“Sometimes?”

“Hey, like I said — unstable. Those won’t work inside those force-fields Gadget puts up, either, by the way. None of these weapons will.”

“Oh well,” she sighed. What else have we got?” She took the other vambrace from the shelf, and snapped it onto her other forearm. It locked into place and lit up.

“What about that one?” asked Gadget. He pointed to the third shelf, where there sat what looked sort of like a 1940’s Tommy Gun. Yeah, right . . . If it had been designed by Nikolai Tesla on a bender. The frame and fore-grip were of glass, and the barrel was a spiral of copper tubing wrapped around a dense coil of copper wire; the tip on the front of the barrel was more like a nozzle — like the nozzle off a garden hose — and the receiver was a metal box festooned with capacitors, wires, small vacuum tubes, and transistors. The stock was metal, too, and similarly home to two green perf-boards bolted to either side, containing dozens of integrated circuit chips and other circuits, with an iPhone stuck to one of them — as a control panel, he guessed — and all of it wired back to the receiver. The grip was metal with rubber cushioning, and the trigger was plastic . . . it looked like it belonged on a Super Soaker water pistol. Mounted above the stock, protruding out the back of the receiver, there was a plastic tank — probably from the same Super Soaker — filled with some kind of viscous liquid that glowed slightly with a soft bluish emanation unlike anything he’d ever seen before. Now just what the hell did this thing do?

Misto spoke, answering his question. “Oh that,” he said. “That, is Dizzy’s — and I guess Mechanology’ — prototype design for a shrink ray. Dizzy calls it the Pymcelerator. It subtracts mass from an object and shifts it onto another dimensional membrane . . . and then shifts it back again. But I should warn you. It has a recharge on it; you can only fire it once every thirty seconds. Same deal with your force-fields as the other weapons here. And, it has a serious design flaw.”

“And that is?” Asked Gadget, picking it up and pretending to fire it at imaginary enemies, toying it, getting a feel for the weight of it in his hands.

“The problem is,” said Misto, “it has a shitty memory. It can only work with three things at a time. So let’s say you miniaturize something . . . like say you miniaturized me, right? Well. Let’s say you did that. And then let’s say that while I’m still miniaturized, you miniaturize Zoë here. Okay, good so far. Then let’s say you miniaturized Dizzy, and Mystikite. Well, then, guess what? I’m fucked. Because then you can’t re-enlarge me. You can only re-enlarge Zoë, Dizzy, and Mystikite. Because it can only re-enlarge the last three things it miniaturized.”

“Oh,” said Gadget. “Well that is a design flaw, then. Guess I’d better be careful with it.”

“Oh and it also can’t work forever,” said Misto. “It requires fuel. See that liquid in the tank on the back?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s Dizzy’s ‘Putter-Pendleton Formula.’ It’s a quantum superfluid that drives the miniaturization process. Creates the initial subatomic reaction that creates the right kind of particles that are suspended in the beam, and that thus cause the process to reach critical levels in the target. If it runs out, you’re screwed. And the larger the target, the more of it will be used.”

“Gotcha,” said Gadget. “Do we have any more with us?”

“Just one refill,” said Misto. He reached into the steamer trunk, down below the shelves, and opened one of the compartments and removed a similar tank. He handed it to Gadget, who stuffed it into one of his coat pockets. He noticed his coat and shirt were sweaty and sticky. God, he hoped he wasn’t developing Con Funk. “Oh,” he said, “one more thing.”

He sat the Pymcelerator down on the floor, then reached into the steamer trunk and grabbed Dizzy’s guitar by the neck, and lifted it out. Jesus but it was heavy! How the hell did she manage to carry this thing and still play it? He lifted the strap over his head and put on the guitar, and situated it so that it lay across his back, with the neck sticking up, the way a medieval traveling minstrel might have carried his guitar, or the way an archer might carry his quiver of arrows. The thing weighed a ton — he was already sweating from the effort — but he would gladly carry the burden of it. For Dizzy.

“We’ll give this to her when we see her again,” he said, nodding decisively. He picked up the Pymcelerator, and then turned to face Zoë. His hands trembled.

Are you sure about this? whispered the Beast. You’ll just get yourself killed, you know.

He turned to face Misto.

“I’m ready when you two are,” he said, not entirely sure he meant that. “Let’s go kick some names and take some ass!”

“You got that backwards, hon,” said Zoë.

“I did?” He said. Damn. He had. “Well crap. You know what I meant.” He noticed that the Pymcelerator had a clip on its butt-end; he used it to hook it to his belt so it would dangle, rather than him having to hold it. He stood up straight and looked Misto in the eye. “So, do you think we have a chance?” he said.

Misto put a big, blue-furred, clawed hand on his shoulder. “Indeed we do. Now let’s go get Dizzy back, before Ravenkroft really pisses her off and she has to kill him before we get the chance.”