She should have been hurled away with the winds, as helpless as a leaf, to freeze to death, suffocate, or simply be plunged into chilling waters after a long plummet and flattened against the churning seas below.

I had a TK hand on her, and she was within the area of my control of the winds, so even as three-hundred-mile-an-hour winds howled around us, around us was all they did, even if the sound itself was literally deafening.

Voice didn’t really care about the loudness, however.

“Quite artistic and ruthless what you did here, although I question your choice of targets. Still, harnessing a dying hurricane was doubtless more effective than a minor squall on the Mediterranean.”

Her hands were on her ears and she was screaming into the loudness, staring at me as I drew her towards me, her eyes flaring with her power as she looked at the world, but could do nothing to affect it.

I put up a Sound Bubble, and the noise of the wind vanished instantly, cut off like a knife.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH...?” she was howling, and suddenly realized she could hear herself. She pulled her hands away from her ears, still staring at me, and looked around, gawking at the suddenly very unfriendly skies she could see roiling, churning, and shattering all around. There was a fear there, a sudden realization of just how powerful and hostile the weather could be to a mere human who could not control it...

Hnh. Tall, very dark skin, shockingly white hair shaved in a warrior’s braid, blue eyes, killer figure, and a black uniform in a neotribal modern design. A ruby was inset into an amulet at her throat, and another into a headband on her head.

Askari design.

She saw my eyes narrow, and took the verbal offensive. “What have you done to me?!” she screamed at me, trying to reach me, trying to extend her power out, command the air and the weather to slam me with the winds, strike at me with lightning, and pound me with hail and ice.

None of that happened, of course. It would be several minutes before her suppressed link to the weather returned.

I turned her on her head, then wrapped her up in webbing stronger than steel, lashing her feet to her thighs and her arms to her sides as she struggled helplessly, spinning her around and around as silken cables bound her tight.

I flicked a 10 of Spades up, and stuck it into her forehead as she started to curse at me. She nearly bit her tongue at the cold and forbidding sensation of Silver Magic coming in and taking the suppression of her powers to an ongoing state. She could feel the card sticking into her skull, and even see the edge of it up between her eyes.

I flicked up a 2 of Diamonds, enlarged it to the size of a TV screen, and the two diamonds on it played over her up and down.

Data flowed into existence on the holo-card. She gawked at the display.

“Ororo Munroe, age 17. Askari agent. Daughter of N’Dare and David Munroe. Mutant, Elemental power of Weather control, Core 367 in size. Trained as a thief and saboteur. Hereditary Powered Shamanic Bloodline, interesting. Good physical condition if not exceptional, high Dex, Intelligence average, better Wisdom, exceptional Charisma.” I glanced at her as she gawked at me. “You’ve the wisdom to know better, so why are you with the Askari? They are a dead-end faction of racist idiots who can’t help you develop your gifts at all. Given the lives your storm has taken here, I should probably just eliminate you here and now.”

She sneered at me. “You think I am afraid of death?” She tried to spit at me, but her jaw clamped shut and she almost bit her tongue off instead.

“I am a sorceress.” I stared at her, and lights began to rise up behind my eyes, too, and more than just the air was trembling around me. Her glowing eyes grew really wide as she could see my power building, extending off me, completely different and in no way inferior to her own. “Kill you? Why would I kill you? Stripping you of your will and turning you into my puppet would be far more beneficial to me... or stealing your powers for myself.” I stared at her as the temperature dropped down well below freezing, coating her face in ice she was not immune to, although the webbing insulated the rest of her. “Answer my question, child, or I will rip what I seek from your soul.”

Her bravado tried to come up, faltered and cracked, staring at the humming of my power rising over her. “You pale-skinned scum and your cursed religion killed my parents! I am taking revenge for the evil you have committed in their names!”

“Oh?” Well, seemed like a good cause for revenge. “A fool’s task at best. Is this your first mission alone? And here it is going to end at my whim.” I tilted my head at her. “Please continue. Tell me what terrible faith I belong to, and how I slew your parents with it.”

“The plane that crashed into our hotel was sabotaged!” She writhed inside her cocoon with emotion. “I was shown proof of it! It was no accident, it was murder! I will return the deaths tenfold, a hundredfold to your kind!”

“Mmm, no. One way or another, you are going to stop here,” I interrupted her dismissively, and she flinched at the absolute judgement in my words. “What was this hotel, when did it happen, and who did the sabotage?” I asked her directly.

“It was the Continental in Cairo, ten years ago! It was the Crux who sabotaged the plane, agents of your filthy Christian religion!” she swore at me.

I flicked out my Vaccine silently and sparked up an ethernet connection, punching in the data.

The Tribes had a lot of information on everything. As I was reading, I negligently flicked up copies of the screens to the sides for her to read along with me.

An airplane had lost engine power and slammed into the hotel in Cairo, destroying the building and killing dozens of people when it did. It was a major news item at the time. I browsed through the Lexipedia, followed a couple links, and she could only watch helplessly as I read up on her past history.

“Mmm. Well, it very well might have been sabotage, but it wasn’t the Crux,” I murmured, making her blink in shock.

“Hah! As if I would believe that!” she sneered at me.

“I’m sure you know the creed of the Crux very well, do you not?” I flicked it up in front of her, racist and religious propogandist drivel that it was. “Note this.” I highlighted a line.

We are Servants of God, and we bear only the greatest love and admiration for those who do the work of the Lord.

“The Crux are scum, but they very, very strictly adhere to a certain practice. They do NOT harm Christian religious figures of any stripe, be they missionaries, nuns, volunteers, evangelists, priests, ministers, or the like. Doing so is a terminable offense, for any reason. I trust you are aware of this? The Askari like to use it, keeping Christians as hostages or unknowing shields against Crux retaliation.”

She looked like she wanted to swallow something bad. “I am aware of it!” she admitted defiantly, as if it was a perfectly acceptable tactic.

“Excellent.” I rotated two screens in front of her. One was a description of the Cairo Continental, and the other was a passenger manifest and obituaries of all the people killed when the plane crashed.

I’d highlighted a few areas.

The Continental is a favorite stopover point for missionaries and volunteers coming in to work among the tribes of Africa.

There were six such missionaries who’d died in the collapse of the hotel. Their names and obituaries were right in front of her.

An Orthodox priest, two nuns, and a couple Lutheran volunteers had died on the plane. Their obituaries were also right in front of her, from different sources in their homelands.

She stared at it all, trying to process what was going on.

“The Crux would not have taken out the plane nor the hotel without ensuring that the religious personnel would survive. If they are responsible for taking out either, those who did so are now dead for such a monumental goof-up, and you are trying to take revenge on the dead.

“But what I find interesting is that the articles have no mention of sabotage suspected, and the Crux naturally made no claim of responsibility. This kind of thing has occurred before, and the Crux actually delivers the heads of those responsible to the authorities, and pays a form of weregild for the fallen to their churches or families. The acknowledgement of responsibility is one of the reasons why so many fools think they are a righteous organization.

“Nothing like that is recorded here. Everyone seems to think it was truly an accident.” I inclined my head. “So, Ororo Munroe, daughter of a Murican descended from random slaves and probably with white blood from raped slave women in his ancestry, and whose contaminated blood soiled a woman from a pure and holy Shamanic lineage, who told you this?”

Her parent’s obituaries rose before her, and I highlighted the survivor under both of them.

Ororo Munroe.

She stared at the pictures of her parents in shock and growing horror, and her name underneath them.

“Did you ever tell the Askar your parent’s names?” I inquired of her. She bit her lip, and was about to say something when I went on, “They are an intelligence agency. They knew before you did so, so it is a meaningless question. And you came across information that the Crux were responsible for their deaths... where? In Askari files you went searching for and found?...

“Now, then, do you happen to know a network of individuals who would strike ruthlessly at foreigners, particularly white foreigners or those with their blood, and definitely any kind of Christians, and would have no qualms about eliminating those of their own people who worked with such, or catered to their business?”

I could see the horror starting to grow on her face as she realized what was going on.

“You, you are lying-!” she blurted out, trying to turn away from the screens showing everything.

“The Askari have access to modern technology, so you are definitely familiar with basic information searches on the etherweb. Even I am!” I scoffed immediately at her. “You watched me input the search terms. You saw where I went. I had no way of knowing who you were or your past or what I would be looking at when I arrived here and shut you down.

“This information here is all public domain.” I waved at all the stuff on display, then snapped my fingers and it all went away. My smile was merciless as I continued, “Do the Askari have genetic scanners?” I asked, flicking up a 2 of Spades, and as her face contorted in sudden foreboding, I scanned her up and down with it once.

Up popped pictures of her parents at the moment of her conception, no names: a handsome African male, and a woman who could have been her older sister. This rapidly grew and split, and grew and split again. I noted the unbroken line of white-haired, blue-eyed women on the matrilineal side, the array of dark faces of various shades elsewhere.

And then, six generations back on her father’s side, a harsh and very obvious Caucasian face loomed up across from a black woman, their daughter definitely a lighter brown than her mother.

The man’s lineage extended back, pure Caucasian as far as I cared to see it. Then again, two more generations back and down a different bloodline, there was another white man and another black woman with a paler-skinned son.

“So, about three percent Caucasian, give or take,” I noted, tapping my jaw as she looked horrified. “Surely the Askari would not hold a mere three percent pollution in one of the sacred African bloodlines against you? After all, it isn’t your fault. It’s your mongrel of a father’s fault for daring to covet one of the pure heritages of Africa, and your hateful European ancestors for daring to mix rotten white blood with the true bloodlines of the homeland.

“I’m sure the Askari would embrace you and treat you as fully and cleanly as any one of their own one hundred percent pure members.”

The look in her eyes said she knew better than that. The Askari took bloodlines very seriously, and those with impure bloodlines were nothing but fodder to be sacrificed to kill their heathen, impure, sacrilegious, and unclean ancestral cousins. Indeed, getting them to kill their cousins and the descendants of their wretched ancestors was considered proper poetic justice.

If they died in the attempt, it was even better!

She was nothing but a tool in their eyes, to be manipulated and used to kill... and she had willingly played her role.

I dialed a number on my Vaccine, a number that could be reached from a completely dead telephone if you happened to know it.

“Yes?” the phone picked up with a familiar voice.

“Master Wong, how are you? This is Dealer.”

“Ah, Miss Dealer! I am fine, thank you. Why are you calling?” He was curious, given that I lived literally across the street.

“I am sitting here across from an estranged daughter of an ancient line of white-haired, blue-eyed African women mystics. I was thinking of taking her home to see her family and learn some truths about her heritage.”

“Ah, the Rain Queens of Balobedu! Their line is indeed long and esteemed, and even held a Sorceress Supreme! Do you need an introduction?”

“That would probably be for the best, Master Wong.”

“I will make a call or two. I imagine that you also need directions?” He sounded somewhat amused at the situation...