Scene 7 - December 20th

Interior Ambrosia Compound, Early Afternoon

Miles Mercer

“Hey, boss?” I said, knocking on the door to Thornhill’s office. “You got a moment?” With some people - with Dr. Hartland, or Penny - I might not have bothered to wait for a response before opening the door. For others - Laura, rest her soul, or many of the lesser-ranking members of the Ambrosia Company - I wouldn’t even have knocked. With Susan Thornhill, however... with her, it was best to wait.

“Enter.”

Thornhill’s office was relatively plain, as far as the office of a CEO went, and I had seen my fair share. She believed in minimalism, and so apart from her desk and a single work of art - a simplified depiction of the myth of Prometheus stealing fire - the office was bare.

It was a real pain, because it meant that there was nowhere for me to sit.

“What is it, Middleman?” Thornhill asked, glancing up at me from a thick sheaf of paperwork. She seemed, I observed, to be experimenting with a new eye color today - bright gold - but was otherwise in her normal appearance. It wasn’t unusual to see her do this, admittedly - ever since Hartland had managed to create a treatment which could replicate Penny’s shapeshifting abilities, at least at a low level, Thornhill had been moving more and more towards an idealized version of her real appearance. Although literal gold was a bit of a step away from her natural hazel.

“You remember a few months back, when one of our clients - a Maxwell Copperfield - got a purchasing agent captured?” I asked.

She closed the folder and tilted her head slightly, thinking. “Yes, I think I remember. What was it that we sold him again?”

“I passed on some magical textbooks to him back when he was just a stage magician. Or copies of them, rather. They weren’t all that helpful, but...” I shrugged. “So little is, when it comes to learning magic.” You really needed either personal tutelage - and one teacher to many students, as college magical studies courses ended up being, usually didn’t cut it - or serious dedication to personal experimentation if you wanted to get good at magic.

“I recall the situation. Why bring it up now?” she questioned.

“Well, I added something to the mission of the Legion who was sent to New Venice a while back,” I explained. “Copperfield had been planning a heist of another magical text - an instructional book written by Merlin - and I demanded that he lend it to me. As recompense for interfering with our agent, supposedly.”

Thornhill smirked slightly - she wasn’t one for actually seeking vengeance, too pragmatic to do anything that didn’t benefit her materially, but she wasn’t above finding it amusing. “And that worked?”

“Yes - possibly only because it was Legion threatening him, but he did agree to make a copy of the book and pass it on to us, after he had stolen it.”

“I assume he has now done so?”

I scratched the back of my head. “Well... he made the attempt, at least. Things kind of got out of hand, apparently. The report just came in from our sources in New Venice’s DMO.” I tapped her folder and whispered a few words, swapping its contents with those of the report in my own office.

“I’m going to need that back.”

“Just read.” I leaned against the wall and waited while Thornhill skimmed through the report, a slow smile spreading across her face as she did. “Yeah, I thought you’d like this,” I said when she finished.

“I do - at least, in theory. It’s been years since we had eyes on the Mountain King’s armor, and we certainly didn’t have any agents who might have been able to take it from him at the time. But with the armor in other hands - weaker hands - it becomes a real possibility, particularly now that we have Legion.”

“Not to mention Excalibur,” I added. “The things we could do with a power-magnifier of that scale...”

“We’ll have to pass it around and see whether it’s more helpful in your hands or Hartland’s,” she mused.

“I bet I could use it to crack some of the more esoteric spells I’ve been working on...” I wheedled.

“We’ll pass it around,” Thornhill said firmly. “If it will produce more profit with you, it will be yours. If it’s more profitable with Hartland, it will be his.”

I sighed. “Yes, boss.”

“Good. Go speak to the Legions and have them send an iteration to New Venice to keep an ear to the ground for this ‘Round Table’. Once they pop up again, we’ll take their artifacts.” I nodded and turned to go, but was halted by another word from the CEO. “Wait.”

“What it is, boss?”

“Who’s this?” She tapped the face of one of the heroes noted as being involved with the incident.

I squinted, mentally turning the image in my head. “...Newton? They’re a new member of New Venice’s junior hero team. Joined a month or two ago.”

“Doesn’t that costume look familiar?”

“It... could be one of the psychic augmenters that Laura invented,” I admitted. “But that can’t be right - we haven’t sold any of the actual suits since she died.”

“I don’t believe we’ve sold anything to this person. So where did their suit come from?”

I picked up the file and peered at them. “Hm...” I murmured a switching spell again, fetching a file on Newton specifically, so I could get a better look. “I’m not too familiar with Laura’s tech, obviously - not my department - but this doesn’t look like a recent model. Aren’t we on the PA9 or PA10?”

“We need to double check the storage units that we keep the oldest models in, then,” Thornhill said, clearly making plans. “I doubt anyone was able to steal from us, but just in case... and we’ll need to reach out to those who did purchase an actual PA suit and see if any of theirs were stolen.”

“Or if any of them were able to replicate their suits,” I pointed out. “If so, maybe hire them? Hartland hasn’t been able to continue work on them, as he?”

“No, he hasn’t - that’s why we’re not offering the suits themselves anymore.” She frowned. “Wait... Kaufman had been working on the suits before we hired her.”

‘Hired’ was one way of saying ‘kidnapped’, I supposed - Ambrosia’s standard method, in fact. “I think so, yes.”

“Perhaps it really is one of the oldest models, from before then. Do we have Newton’s name?”

“Their registration with the DMO says... Quinn Kaufman. Laura’s child?”

“Most likely an early model, in that case,” Thornhill murmured, considering. “Dealing with Newton will be a low priority, but I think it still needs to be on the list. I want to keep that technology under our control, and the possibility of Newton noticing the similarities between their suit and that of Starling, or any of the others who posses PAs - or between their powers and those who used a PA to get them - is a worrying one.”

“Ambrosia isn’t exactly a secret though, is it?”

“Not precisely, but we’re still flying under the radar. Until I can get the legislation to explicitly legalize selling powers approved - I do need that back, by the way -”

“Yes, yes.” I reversed the switches I had performed, restoring the paperwork to where it had once been.

“- the company needs to remain relatively secret. Having someone who could potentially discover us from the outside, without being able to offer them anything to keep them quiet...”

“We could always kill them,” I suggested.

“True, true...”

“Starling and Canaveral are based in that city,” I said. “With Newton on the same team, any suspicions would probably be raised to one of them - and then they could shut down Newton’s ideas.”

“Hmm.” After a bit of thought, Thornhill decided, “We’ll leave their suit as a target of opportunity. It being stolen might draw their attention to it even further, if they haven’t already noticed the similarities. For now, we’ll leave them be - but if the Legion we’re sending now has a good opportunity to take them out and steal the suit, she should do it.”

“Seems unlikely, but I’ll let her know.”