Episode 90

Chapter 2 of the Winter's Heart Saga

Part I

[Timeline note - this episode takes place on the same day as episode 85, "Wild Women Don't Get the Blues - Part II".]

"... five degrees here at the Vole, nine forty-eight in the A.M. Looks like it's gonna be another one of those clear, gorgeous days that makes allll that rain worth it."

"Y'know what I think I'm gonna do today, Billy?"

"Tell me what you're gonna do today, Jerry."

"Come ten o'clock, I'm jumping in my car, headin' up to Grouse and doing some skiing. Then after that, I'm gonna get back in the car, drive down to English Bay, and just kind of hang out on the beach for a while."

"Sounds nice, Bill. Y'know, you've got those mild November temperatures and all that blue sky, I bet the beach is looking pretty good."

"If I wasn't such a wuss, I might try a little swimming."

"It's almost warm enough."

"Almost, almost... and you know, Bill, with all the rain we had last week, the ski runs have some nice powder on them."

"Sounds like the perfect day on the West Coast to me, Jer."

"Yup, and then y'know what I'm gonna do?"

"What's that, Jerry?"

"I'm gonna call up my brother in Toronto and laugh my ass off at him."

"They had what, twenty centimetres of snow last night?"

"... and just laugh, and laugh, and laugh... "

"Well, you know what I'm planning for today, Jer, I'm thinking I might head down to the Natural History Museum and checking out that new exhibit they have, 'The Winter's Heart'."

"... and laugh... and laugh.. huh? Sorry, Bill, I just kind of drifted off there... what are you doing?"

"I said I'm going to check out 'The Winter's Heart' at the Natural History Museum."

"Sounds like a good plan, Bill... you've probably heard about this, the Winter's Heart is this just absolutely colossal blue diamond that they recently dug up at this archaeological dig in Scotland or the north of England, I can't remember which."

"It weighs in at 396 carats - just imagine something like that on an engagement ring."

"Supposedly it had some kind of religious significance to the druids and other primitive tribes that lived in that area hundreds and hundreds of years ago. It's got a lot of interesting stories around it, so if you like ancient history and you also like shiny things, I recommend you check it out. And who doesn't like shiny things?"

"But fellas, you might want to keep your lady-friends out of the jewellery stores after, if you take my meaning."

"Hey, we've got another patented Vole Rock Pack coming up in juuust sixty seconds, featuring Sloan, the Tragically Hip, Belle Adonis, Creeper, AC/DC and much, much more. Stick around."

In a shabby apartment in a nearly-forgotten neighbourhood of south Haney, Maple Ridge, a pile of clothes, papers and empty chip bags which someone had heaped on a battered armchair suddenly lurched to life. A good portion of the papers and chip packages fell away, revealing the pale, sunken form of Adrian Room, antiquarian.

He pitched himself out of the chair, brushing aside the detritus that had somehow accumulated on him, and turned up the volume on the stereo. He was too late, however, for the inane morning DJ's had moved on from their discussion of the object which had caught his attention, and he was subjected to a blaring commercial for a furniture and mattress store.

He shut the stereo off and stood in front of it for a few minutes, lost in thought; then he whirled around and bounded for another corner of the room, where several weeks worth of partially read newspapers were stacked. Somewhere in that pile, he thought, buried on some inner page of the arts and culture section, must have been the crucial announcement, which he had inobservantly passed over.

Dress Adrian Room up in a tweed suit, and add about ten pounds or so to his frame, and he would have looked like a perfect stereotype of the liberal arts academic of about fifty years ago. He was tall and slender, his thinning hair sticking out in many improbable angles. Perched on the end of his nose was a pair of half-moon glasses in a noticeable need of cleaning. At the moment he was dressed in a pair of old slippers and a worn dressing gown, thrown over a set of striped flannel pyjamas. He was in the neighbourhood of forty years old, although he looked considerably older. He himself explained this as due to the burden of knowing unnameable secrets, secrets learned while pursuing eldritch studies that sane me shrank from. His few remaining close friends, however, said it was due to a worthless diet and too much mold and stale air.

Room had started his career in the studies of rare manuscripts, innocently enough, even if his passion for ever rarer items ended up giving him some eccentric ideas. Such as those in his honours dissertation, which argued that the works of Shakespeare had been written by Lady Jane Grey, generally supposed to have been executed fifty years earlier; or those in a paper which analysed the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and concluded that the poet had a carefully hidden conjoined twin named Joshua.

The turning point had come after he became an editor for the Obscure Books division of the New England firm of Cobham & Sons. A steady diet of bizarre yet entirely genuine manuscripts lead Room's patterns of though ever further from the norm; when a yellowed bundle of papers supposed to be a complete edition of the Baubilieux Florilegium crossed his desk, it seemed almost inevitable that he become obsessed by it. Absconding with the manuscript, he fled for Canada's west coast and took up his current residence in this dilapidated and marginal part of Maple Ridge.

He continued to decline from eccentricity to outright lunacy. All of his money, a medium-sized inheritance from one of those uncles that New England seems full of, he poured into collecting obscure manuscripts and strange equipment, all for the purpose of practicing the experiments and rituals described in his stolen copy of the Florilegium. Room now fancied himself a student of the unspeakable dark arts. That he was not necessarily at the high end of the bell curve was demonstrated by his continuing failure to get results.

All this, a sudden surge of excitement assured him, was surely about to change. He finally located the half-column article in the Maple Ridge Gazette he was sure he would find. The Winter's Heart, unearthed the previous year near the remote British town of Clinton, would be arriving in town for a two weeks to give local scholars an opportunity to examine it first hand; it would be displayed to the general public for the first week at the Natural History Museum.

Room's pulse raced. The Winter's Heart; a diamond of surpassing size, purity and colour, rumoured for a very long time as the singular holy gemstone of a particular sect of northern Druids, shunned by their southern counterparts. Supposedly, while most branches of Britain's Celtic religions celebrated spring and the season of growth, to the Winter's Hearth Druids it was the season of cold and senescence that was most holy. Growth and warmth to them were a corruption; a green and fertile earth was an abomination to their gods, who demanded a return to perpetual ice and snow. Most archaeologists dismissed stories of the cult as a poor fantasy based on garbled accounts; even those who conceded that such a reverse of the usual Celtic religion had some basis in fact positively rejected the notion of a gigantic stone with unusual powers. The entire thing, they said, was nothing but the worst sort of popular superstition.

And then the stone was found.

The entire controversy erupted anew. It was true, this very spectacular diamond was found beneath the foundations of a village dating from the right time period, and there was evidence that the stone had not been cut any time in the last five hundred years. And it was also true that the mountains near Clinton where it was found was supposed to have been the centre of the winter cult. But none of this proves anything. As well, the Winter's Hearth was supposedly a flawless gem, and this stone had a rather prominent fracture along one side.

This didn't stop it from being called the Winter's Heart, nor did it affect the dramatic sum of money that the British Museum's appraisers said was its minimum worth, intact. And then there were those who, like Adrian Room, who had access to certain questionable books that told the story of how the flawless Winter's Heart had acquired its crack, and how it came to be in the place that it was found. Moreover, they hinted at some of the things that the stone could really do, once the flaw had been corrected.

Room sat back in the kitchen chair and considered. There was no question, he must get access to the stone. Although he could claim a legitimate scholarly interest in it, past dealings with the Natural History Museum had left him on bad terms with the staff. They considered him, rather unfairly he thought, to be a nut. Thus his only choice was to skip the proper channels. He would have to somehow get to the jewel under the cover of darkness.

Which would not be easy, since it was one of the most valuable gems in the world, and likely to be protected by an absurd amount of security. But not getting the stone wasn't an option.

He stood from the table and began rummaging around on the top of the refrigerator for his address book. There was one person who could get him into the Museum... and he was lucky enough that she owed him a favour.

Hydrogen Guy
So, you're all right?

Yolanda
Uh-huh.

Deuterium Boy
No massive internal bleeding? No broken bones? No third degree burns?

Yolanda
My stomach feels, like, kinda yucky...

Hydrogen Guy shook his head.

Hydrogen Guy
I'm pretty sure you're not invulnerable. Either you're just amazingly lucky, or DB's Cosmic Pie's taken a liking to you.

Deuterium Boy
You sure you're okay?

Doctor
She's fine. Just a little banged up, is all.

Yolanda St. Claire, more commonly known as Helium Girl, half sat and half lay on a folding bed in the Emergency Room of Maple Ridge General Hospital. Her hair was in a frazzled disarray, as are her clothes, and both seemed slightly singed. Her brightly coloured co-crusaders, Hydrogen Guy and Deuterium Boy, stood beside her, radiating concern. A doctor in green scrubs stood with them.

Doctor
Frankly, I don't understand it either, if what you told me she went through is true. From what little I know of her powers, she should be as much of a mess after that pounding as any normal human.

Yolanda
Well, I've been, like, working out a little...

Hydrogen Guy
So we can take her home?

Doctor
Please. The fewer superheroes I have in the ER, the better.

Shortly afterwards the three heroes were crossing the hospital parking lot. Yolanda hugged the deep green pea coat she wore, which she had refused to remove even in the emergency room.

Yolanda
So I guess you're like gonna flip out now?

Hydrogen Guy
No, of course not. We're just glad you're not hurt.

Yolanda
'Cause she started it. I was just completely minding my own business, when she comes up and starts going all Linda Blair on me. I mean, like, what am supposed to do, just sit back and let her fry me?

Hydrogen Guy
I'm not arguing.

Yolanda
I'm like totally sorry about all the damage, like I know it really sucks. I mean that one store was one that I totally liked and everything, too. It's not like I was aiming for it or anything when I blasted her...

Deuterium Boy
No, of course not.

They were walking towards a sleek black vehicle, not quite as large as a pick-up truck, but a bit bulkier than a coupe of similar length. It sported a small yellow "³H-II" decal on the side. Deuterium Boy pointed his key-chain at it and recited the pass code, and the security system responded with a musical chime as it disarmed itself.

Yolanda
Ohmygod, is this the new Tritium Truck?

Deuterium Boy
Yep.

Hydrogen Guy
The Tritium Truck II, as a matter of fact. You don't mind taking the back?

He opened the passenger side door and Yolanda climbed inside.

Yolanda
Wow, like, this is really nice! DB, the leather seats are amazing!

Deuterium Boy
It's not real leather, actually. It's the latest thing - cloned earthworm skin.

Yolanda
EW! EW!! I'm sitting on worms?!

Hydrogen Guy
Hey, is it comfortable, or isn't it? Try out the seat massager, it's just like peristalsis.

Yolanda
Errrg!

Deuterium Boy climbed in the driver's seat, with HG riding shotgun. The hydrogen-powered engine thrums silently to life, and Deuterium Boy starts pulling out of the parking space.

Deuterium Boy
Yeah, we got a real deal on this thing by agreeing to field test a lot of the high-concept stuff - like the Ballard fuel cell, the Clone-rinthian leather, the resizeable cup-holders.

Hydrogen Guy
Though frankly, I still think the glove compartment's too small.

Deuterium Boy
Getting back to this morning --

Yolanda
Okay, yah, sorry, didn't mean to change the topic. Just, like, I totally want you guys to know, I'm really, really sorry about this morning. I swear it won't happen again.

Hydrogen Guy
We understand, Helium Girl. We're not mad.

Yolanda
Really?

Deuterium Boy
Nope.

Yolanda
Wow. I'm, like, so relieved.

Deuterium Boy
We'd only be upset if it were our problem.

Silence.

Yolanda
Umm... what do you mean?

She looks nervously out the window.

Yolanda
Guys, this isn't the way back the Cave... Where are we going?

Hydrogen Guy
To the police station.

Deuterium Boy
By the way, you're under arrest.

Yolanda
OH COME ON!! DAAVE!!

Deuterium Boy
Don't look at me, I'm just doing my job.

Yolanda
That is totally not fair! You can't arrest me, I'm your partner!!

Hydrogen Guy
Yolanda, there's a name for people who demolish city blocks in personal fights. They're called "supervillains".

Yolanda
She attacked me FIRST! I'm not the one who went all apeshit over a stupid coat!!

Hydrogen Guy
So why didn't you call us for back-up? I was having coffee with Chuck War, and DB was just driving around in the new truck. It's not as if we weren't available, we could have been there in five minutes.

Yolanda
I don't always need you two helping me! I was doing totally fine by myself, she was like ready to give in when you showed up!

Deuterium Boy
Helium Girl, going up against someone with that kind of power level is not only dangerous, its irresponsible.

Hydrogen Guy
Especially when you don't know who she is or what she's really capable of.

Deuterium Boy
In a situation like that, even Mr. Ego here calls for help.

Hydrogen Guy
Hey --

Deuterium Boy
It's the only way to minimize property damage and protect innocent people from getting hurt.

Hydrogen Guy
Besides, carrying on in public like that makes you look really bad...

Helium Girl
Well, I'm sorry, it's not like she really gave me a chance to get to my cell phone! Guys, c'mon! I'm really, really, really sorry, I promise I'll never do anything like that again! Please don't arrest meeee...

She was starting to sound distinctly watery.

Deuterium Boy
It's either us or the police, which would you prefer?

Yolanda
You are such assholes! [sniffle]

They drove in silence for several minutes, punctuated by angry crying sounds from the back seat. Finally Hydrogen Guy spoke up.

Hydrogen Guy
Okay, we're not really arresting you. The police just want a statement. And they might yell at you a bit, but they won't press any charges.

She continued glaring angrily.

Deuterium Boy
And you have to sign the League of Heroes damage waiver.

Yolanda
What?

Hydrogen Guy
The form that says you're paying for all the damage out of your personal grant.

Yolanda
Okay... I guess I didn't really need the plasma enhancer gloves... [sniff] I still think you're assholes.

Hydrogen Guy
You're a woman. I'm getting used to it.

Meanwhile, at the Usual Coffee Shop, we find the reunion of two old friends in progress. Timothy Thomas Kettle - known to classmates as "T Kettle" - had been at Harvard with Adrian Room many years ago. The good T Kettle, alas, had been escorted off this mortal coil fifteen years ago by the Thatcher Youth Wing's careening tour bus back in the family's native England.

His daughter Sally, though, was very much alive. In fact, those who knew her as an aspiring young florist would probably say they'd never met anyone more alive than Sally. It was her second career and more profitable, however, that Adrian Room wished to discuss with her.

Sally
Well, Adrian, as wonderful as all this catching up on old times is, perhaps you should tell me what it is you want.

She wore her blond hair in a bob, and her brown eyes were examining him incisively. She spoke with a distinct English accent, only slightly marred by her years in Canada.

Room plucked self-consciously at his napkin.

Room
Well...

He trailed off, still holding the attitude of someone who could start speaking again at any moment. It was difficult to decide exactly how to phrase his request. Sally prompted him.

Sally
Adrian, dear, I know there's something. You're so reclusive, there has to be some reason why you would call me out of the blue. And I can tell you've got something on that ponderous mind of yours.

He decided the best way was the direct approach.

Room
Sally, I need the Winter's Heart.

She stared at him for half a breath. He was wondering if she knew what the Winter's Heart was, when she burst out laughing.

Sally
You don't really waste time with anything small, do you?

Room
I usually wouldn't ask such a difficult thing, but this is of the utmost importance, and time is limited --

Sally
I didn't say I wouldn't do it! You know I like a challenge. And you've always been very good to me, Adrian, like a genial uncle or something. You were a lot of help to me in University, I suppose I owe you. And honestly, Adrian, it'll be easier than you think. Even the best museum security isn't all that hot. Though I should warn you, the thing will be next to impossible to fence. Our best bet is to smuggle the thing to Amsterdam, I know some rather shady diamond cutters who can split it up. It'll be so much easier to get rid of and we'll get considerably more for it -- Adrian, what is it? You look like a fish!

Room
Oh, no, no, no, no! Sally, you've got me completely wrong. I don't want to steal the jewel, it's not money I'm after... In fact I don't even want to take it out of the Museum. All I need is about a half hour's worth of uninterrupted access to it.

Sally
I don't follow.

Room
Sally, the Winter's Heart is more than just a gigantic diamond, it's primarily an extremely powerful mystic artefact. In numerous books, the titles or which I dare not repeat in public, the Heart is described as the key to unlocking the forbidden entropic secrets of winter itself!

Sally
Ah. Some of that "man was not meant to know" stuff, you mean?

Room
Well, to narrower minds such curiosity as mine is seen as dangerous and unwholesome, but then the common man so often fears what he doesn't understand instead of looking upon it as an opportunity for wonder --

Sally
Yes, yes. Forbidden entropic secrets, gotcha. So... ?

Room
Basically, I need you to get me into the Museum where I can get at the stone. I need to perform a certain ritual - the secrets of the Heart can only be tapped by correcting the gem's single flaw. It's perfectly simple, I go in, perform the ritual, bask in the transfinite mysteries of the unknowable heatless void, and then we leave. No one need be the wiser, in fact, they'll thank us for leaving them a more perfect and valuable gem than they started with. We will, in fact, be doing nothing wrong.

Sally
Stealing it would be much easier. Adrian, the specialty of cat-burglars such as myself is to get themselves in and out, plus assorted loot, quickly and undetectably. Not to bring comparatively clumsy passengers along, no offence. I imagine this ritual of yours involves some kind of chanting, perhaps a musical number?

Room
Er, chanting, yes.

Sally
Loud chanting, of course, nobody ever won over the elder gods by whispering sweetly.

Room
Well, er... it would be hard to do it quietly, yes.

Sally
Despite the incident of the Baldwin's Jade Buddha, I am not a miracle worker. I don't see how... unless... oh, wait a minute...

Room
What is it? You've thought of something?

Sally
My God, yes, and it's a doozy! My stumbling block, Adrian, was that I'm usually all about quite and stealthy, while what you want seems to involve a lot of noise and attention...

Room
Yes?

Sally
So what we obviously want is even more noise and attention... Look, when do you want to do it?

Room
Is tonight possible?

Sally
Eager, aren't you? Barely, but I'm really hot on this idea at the moment, so let's do it. Just to be able to say I've tried something like this, and if it works, my God! ... The Museum closes at seven, right? That gives us more than four hours to set things up. I think that'll give us enough time...

She was almost talking faster than his ears were capable of capturing; she was like this when she had had a really good idea. She quickly downed the remnants of her coffee and grabbed her purse.

Room
Are you going?

Sally
I have a bit more to think through... I'll need to see about the van and the suits, and pick up some cornstarch.

Room
Cornstarch?

Sally
Don't worry your pretty head, dearest. I'll call you in a couple hours and let you know if I can arrange everything for tonight. I'll explain it all then. You just run home and make sure you have enough fresh goat's blood, or whatever else you need. See you soon, thanks for the coffee and the biscuit!

She dashed out. Adrian Room watched her in admiration, feeling that whatever it was Sally had in mind, he was in capable hands.

At approximately fifteen minutes before closing, a visitor to Maple Ridge's Natural History Museum discovered a suspicious package accompanied by traces of an unknown white powder in one of the women's washrooms. Not wanting to take any chances in light of recent events, the museum staff dialled 911 and immediately evacuated the building.

A tense ten minutes later, a white Emergency Response van carrying two personnel in hazardous materials gear pulled up in front of the museum. After a brief consultation with the museum director, the haz-mat team boldly climbed the museum's stone steps and entered the potentially infected building.

Adrian Room was still agog as he and Sally stripped out of their haz-mat suits in the entry to the Museum's geology wing.

Room
I still can't fathom how you did all of this...

Sally
I'm pleasantly surprised it's working so well. It's all a terrible risk. Stealing the haz-mat van was remarkably easy, you'd think the police would have better security at their own station. Planting the cornstarch and then "finding" it was a breeze, of course. The scaly part was that I had to promise Joe Switchboard I'd go out with him if he could redirect all phone traffic from the museum to my cel for fifteen minutes...

Room
I appreciate the sacrifice.

Sally
I should bloody hope so. Come on, it won't be too long before they realise something's wrong. Let's find your big fat rock.

The path to said rock was easily marked. The Winter's Heart was in a gallery by itself, dramatically lit and surrounded by eye-pleasing posters and dioramas depicting its origin and history. But the diamond itself was so compelling, these were barely even noticeable.

The Winter's Heart was a many-faceted, almost spherical polyhedron nearly eight centimetres across. Its colour was a pale, haunting blue, which seemed to lend the crystal its own inner light. The single fracture was visible as a fine crack spiralling from one facet edge all the way to the centre of the stone.

Room felt a chill looking at it; he was unaware if it was from awe or excitement, or something else. Sally gave the gem a single admiring gaze, then busied herself in opening the protective casing.

Sally
Now, when you're done we'll just slip out the back, no need to draw any more attention to ourselves. Is it all right here or do you want it moved somewhere? Just to the floor? All right, if you trust me enough to actually handle it. I'm not sure I trust myself.

Popping open the case, she gingerly picked up the stone between two gloved fingers, then cautiously set it on the spot on the tile floor indicated by Room. From his jacket pockets, he produced a small, moldy leather-bound book, six candles, a lighter, and a malodorous black stick of some greasy substance that was definitely not available in most art stores. With the latter he proceeded to draw a six-limbed figure around the stone, about two meters across. Carefully consulting the book, he scrawled various glyphs and runes at certain points in the design.

Sally
It looks like a kind of demonic snow flake.

Room
That's more or less what it is.

Sally
Oh, that's awful. And here I thought all these puns about diamonds and ice rolling around in my head were bad enough. Listen, while you're busy with this, you don't mind if I do a little window shopping, do you?

Room
Sally, we're not here to steal.

Sally
Well, we're here. And frankly the flower biz isn't the goldmine you might think it is.

Room
Here, if you want to be useful --

He handed her the candles and lighter and instructed her to place and light them at each branch of the snow flake. When this was done, he stepped back and critically inspected their handiwork. Sally glanced at her watch.

Sally
It's been ten minutes.

Room
It isn't a good idea to rush this sort of thing.

Sally
It's not a good idea to dawdle, either. Can we start now please?

Room
All right.

He reached into his last pocket and produced a dark blue cloth cap, and put it on his head. Gold stars, moons, and alchemical symbols were sewn on to it. Sally giggled.

Sally
Where's the embroidery that says "wizzard" with two zeds?

Room
I beg your pardon?

Sally
Nothing, you look ridiculous is all. Unlock your forbidden secrets and let's go.

Room cleared his throat, opened the book, and began chanting. The words were not Latin, Greek, Arabic or any other usual language that ally associated with wizardry. It was a guttural yet lilting sound, perhaps the primordial Celtic tongue spoken centuries before Britain was even inhabited. Whatever it was, Sally didn't like the sounds, and they added to her already growing discomfort.

Adrian Room continued the strange, monotonous chant. His body swayed back and forth, his head bobbed, and he raised and lowered his arms, almost as if he were swimming. It really did look ridiculous, Sally thought, although she couldn't find him amusing any longer.

The ritual seemed to be having an effect. The room seemed to grow colder. The candle flames flickered oddly, as if some draft was waxing and waning in time with the chanting. The impression that the Winter's Heart was emitting light was now very strong. Sally wasn't entirely sure any of these effects were real, or just the product of her frazzled imagination. But if the diamond wasn't glowing, she thought, where were the extra shadows on the candles coming from?

Suddenly a distinctly mundane clatter came from elsewhere in the museum. Somebody had just opened the museum's front doors.

Sally
Adrian!

The tempo and intensity of his chanting increased, although it did not seem to be in response to either Sally or the sounds behind them. Room's movements were becoming more erratic and convulsive, and he seemed to have entered a trance-like state. Sally heard the echo of footsteps from somewhere several halls away, purposefully heading in their direction. Sally called out Room's name again, now genuinely frightened. She feared that if she tried to grab him and shake him out of it, she might hurt him somehow. But she also feared what would happen if whoever had entered the museum discovered them; but mostly. She willed herself not to notice the growing chill in the air and the ever brightening glare from the Winter's Heart.

The footsteps were now getting uncomfortably close; they sounded like they were in the hall just outside the gallery. She heard someone urgently call out "over here!". Their only hope of escaping seemed to lie in taking the stone and running. Hopefully Adrian would notice...

The voices were almost right outside the gallery door when she stepped inside the snow flake markings and grabbed the Winter's Heart.

It was around seven thirty when Deuterium Boy got a call from Gen X Man. A few minutes later, the Tritium Truck II stopped at the edge of the crowd watching the Natural History Museum in curiosity. They found Gen X Man standing with a middle-aged woman in casual business attire. She looked extremely stressed. The Man in Plaid smirked when he saw them.

Gen X Man
Hey, it's the Chemical Crew. Helium Girl, nice performance on the news this morning. Way to stick it to rampant yuppie consumerism.

Helium Girl
Bite me, flannel boy.

Deuterium Boy
What's the story, GX?

Gen X Man
DB, He-Girl, exchange fingerprints with Kaolin Clay, director of yon stone pile.

Helium Girl
Hi!

Deuterium Boy
Ms. Clay, nice to meet you.

Clay
Deuterium Boy, Helium Girl . Thank you for coming. We have rather a strange situation here.

She explained about the white powder scare and the arrival of the haz-mat personnel.

Clay
... and it's been nearly half an hour. I called the police again to check on whether that length of time is normal, but they didn't know anything about my previous call or this haz-mat team.

Deuterium Boy
You think this might be someone trying to steal the Winter's Heart?

Clay
I don't know. If it is, they've got some balls. The police are here now, they just sent a couple officers inside to see what was going on. I appreciate having you three here, just in case this starts getting stranger...

Deuterium Boy
It may not be a supervillain, just a really cocky cadre of crooks.

Gen X Man
Oooh, rein in the alliteration there, DB. Man, I remember when the worst kind of white powder was nose candy and Anthrax was a bad metal band. And Nancy Reagan just said no to both.

Helium Girl
Okay, like, you can stop being over now.

Suddenly, an intense blue-white light began to pour from the windows of the Natural History Museum; a fraction of a second later, an almost subsonic boom came from somewhere inside the museum itself. The crowd of onlookers fell silent.

Clay
Oh my God!

Helium Girl
Like, what is it?

Gen X Man
Nothing good... and you know, I deeply resent anything that makes people talk like a characters in a Godzilla movie.

The light flickered only slightly as the boom died away, then the light increased to a blinding intensity, and an awful crashing and tearing seemed to rip through the museum building. It ended in a thunderous crescendo as a column of the blue-white light exploded through the roof of the building, reaching straight up into the sky, accompanied by a high pitched sound like the grinding of metal against metal.

The crowd almost as a whole decided that perhaps this wasn't a healthy spectacle to keep watching. The onlookers fled, and the three heroes, the police, and a few die-hard museum staff remained as witnesses.

Overhead, thick clouds seemed to be sprouting from the column of light and noise, gradually spreading like a strange churning fungus across the sky. The air remained still, but grew suddenly cold; Helium Girl wished she hadn't left her deep green pea coat back in the Hydrogen Cave.

Gen X Man
Holy Crap, check out the building!

A translucent layer of ice was forming on the face of the building, thickening as they watched into a jagged set of second walls. Fingers of ice shot up from the roof and grew into castle-like turrets. The Natural History Museum was being transformed into an unearthly ice palace, or ice fortress.

Snow began falling from the thickening clouds.

Helium Girl
Uh...DB, I'm gonna show that I've, like, learned something from this morning, and suggest we, like, call for back up.

Deuterium Boy
I'm with you there.

He pulled out his cell phone and dialled Hydrogen Guy. His partner answered in a somewhat faraway voice.

Hydrogen Guy
Yes?

Deuterium Boy
HG?

Hydrogen Guy
It's me, Dave.

He used Deuterium Boy's real name; that meant he was somewhere that he couldn't speak freely.

Hydrogen Guy
Look, whatever it is --

Deuterium Boy cut him off quickly.

Deuterium Boy
HG, we have a problem. A big problem. You need to get down to the Natural History Museum now.

There was a significant pause.

Helium Girl
Is he coming?

Deuterium Boy
I don't know... HG, are you there?

Clay
Something else is happening!

Deuterium Boy
Great now, what?

A rectangular region of ice on the front of the building, where the front doors had been, had begun to glow with the familiar blue-white light. Suddenly, the ice exploded outwards, leaving a brilliant portal in the ice. A figure was silhouetted there in the opening.

A female figure.

Deuterium Boy
Holy Hel and the Frost Giants...

Hydrogen Guy
... Dave?

Deuterium Boy
Yes! HG, are you coming or not, dammit?!

Hydrogen Guy
I'll be there as soon as I can. Out.

Deuterium Boy shouted at him to hurry up, but the line was already disconnected.

The shriek of the light column continued unabated, but otherwise an almost deathly quiet had descended over the museum. The figure in the doorway slowly walked out onto the steps of the museum. A small woman with short blond hair, her skin had a dead pallor that was almost a blue-grey colour. Her dress seemed to be woven of shifting ice crystals, and in the hollow of her breast bone she wore the Winter's Heart.

Physically she still resembled Sally Kettle, but it was the eyes of the Ice Witch that gazed upon Maple Ridge.

Tune in January, 2003 for the thrilling continuation!