Scene 8 - March 27th

Interior Ambrosia Compound, Evening

Miles Mercer

“Hey, boss?” I said, knocking on the door to Thornhill’s office.

“Enter.” I opened it and stepped inside, tossing the folder that I had brought with me - for once - onto her desk. “What’s this?” she asked, closing the one she had already been working on.

“Penny’s report from the three months that an instance of her spent in New Venice,” I informed the CEO.

“Ah yes. Looking for the Round Table and their artifacts,” Thornhill said. She opened the folder and began paging through. “The full three months... no sign of them then, I assume?”

“None,” I confirmed - the third-generation clone of Legion who had been left in the city had been collected and terminated after spending the entire time undercover. If she had found them, she would have returned, but... “It seems they’ve gone to ground.”

“I wonder if we have any way of drawing them out?” Thornhill absently mused.

“I doubt it,” I complained. “Legion’s best guess - and Hartland agrees - is that the Round Table was the wife and children of the Mountain King, having inherited his armor. Which, presumably, means that the man himself is dead - not that knowing his connection to them would have been helpful anyway, since we had no idea where he was anyway.”

“Odd that they’re in his old home city, if they’re trying to hide.”

“They could easily have left. And again, no one knows where he disappeared to after he presumably retired -”

“To raise his chilren, I suppose,” she guessed.

“Probably - so however they’re hiding, it’s pretty effective.”

Thornhill tapped her fingers against the desk rhythmically as she thought. “Some form of magic, I would presume. To hide so effectively not just from us but from the heroes as well - Canaveral is quite an accomplished tracker - they would need to have powerful wards against detection.”

“Most likely a set of wards on their home, wherever that is,” I said. “That’s heavy-duty stuff though - would the Mountain King have been able to do it? I was pretty young when he was doing his thing.” Not to mention that I was a West Coast boy - the man’s stomping grounds in New Venice were all the way on the other side of the country from my hometown of San Francisco.

“Not himself, perhaps - he was a mage of only moderate talent, and that was thanks only to the intelligence-boosting effects of his helmet,” she told me. “But he had a close association with the Maestri, who would certainly have been able to do such a thing. Perhaps when they retired - they all did so at approximately the same time - the Maestri set up wards for the Mountain King as well as for themselves.”

“The Maestri... they were masters of manipulation magic, right?” I asked. “Illusions, mind control, that sort of thing.”

“Exactly. If we put pressure on them, perhaps we can reveal the location of the Mountain King’s family.”

“That still requires us to find them,” I pointed out. “Which seems... basically impossible. They doubtless have the same protective wards on themselves, on top of their own abilities, and we’ve already failed to beat those wards with the Round Table.”

“Ah, but I already know where the Maestri are,” Thornhill said with a smirk. “Or how to find them, at least.”

“...how?”

She flipped through the Legion’s report and stopped on her observations of one of the local heroes - Loki. “The Maestri used a ritual to scour their identities - which the MLED once knew - from all archives, and even managed to wipe the minds of most who ever learned it. But Dr. Hart’s memory treatment kept it safe and sound for me. Maestro and Maestra are also known as Jacob and Delilah Koval - and their child, Holly Koval, is a member of New Venice’s junior hero team.” She gave a self-satisfied smile.

I nodded in understanding. “Get a hold of Loki, and use him to crack his parents...”

“And from there, the Mountain King’s family.”

“It won’t be easy,” I noted. “The MLED is quite protective of its heroes, even with you at the head of the DMO.”

“No, it won’t, which is why I’m going to label that as a last resort,” Thornhill decided. “First, we’ll continue to wait - the Round Table can’t remain underground forever. Sooner or later, they’ll emerge - if it’s later, then perhaps Loki will be a viable target, but if it’s sooner, then we have no need to kick that particular hornet’s nest.” She paused, then added, “Three months more, I think. If there is still no sign of the Round Table at the end of June, then we’ll send a Legion or three after Loki.”

I nodded, privately feeling relieved. I wasn’t unaware that my morals had been compromised to a degree by my time at Ambrosia - I was too invested in it now, had done too much and gained too much from the company. Still, I didn’t want to kidnap anyone, as had once been done to me, Laura, and Hartland - even if neither he nor I wanted to leave any longer. “Yes, boss.”