The scene continues where Mary Murdock meets a young lady named Tandy Bowen, who harbors a terrible secret. She was brought outside her by a mysterious young man with the ability to vanish, and it's not unreasonable to assume he's still waiting on the other side of the door.

Mary's gaze centered on the face of the young woman as she spoke, then the PI waved her into the reception area. The center of the room had a coffee table framed by two couches, one of which Mary indicated.

"Please, have a seat. Would you like any coffee or tea?"

If the young woman responds in the affirmative, Mary goes about preparing the beverage with little apparent difficulty. And if the woman is attentive enough, she may notice that everything Mary touches goes back into exactly the same spot she first retrieves it from.

Her hostess duties politely executed, Mary settled into the couch opposite the woman.

"Perhaps, start from the beginning. I am an excellent listener." she said with a slight smile.

"My friend and I...we've been through a lot. Most people would chalk our story up to an excuse a pair of teenage runaways used to run off after watching too many horror movies.."

She takes a deep breath.

"It's never easy for people who live out on the streets. There's always someone wanting to take advantage of them. But now, someone's kidnapping them and they're not coming back. The last time this happened, it turned out it was the work of a Nazi scientist named Otto Octavius. He was using them for...experiments. We can thank the Spider-Man for putting a stop to that."


"But now it's happening again. At least one a day. Whenever a black car turns a corner you'll see every hobo, every urchin, every street-walker flee to the alleys. And they're too terrified to call the police. Half of them think it is the police."

Mary had heard about the abductions conducted by Octavius, but those had happened when she had still thought she could do real good from a corner office. Spider-Man, whoever he was, had known better. She wondered if she would have a chance to meet him and thank him someday.

"I take it that your friend is one of those that has gone missing?" Mary didn't actually believe that to be the case, but they way the boy this woman had been talking to had up and vanished had made her curious enough to see if the other woman might reveal something.

A serene smile. "Luckily, no. He's very good at hiding. And we keep each other safe." There's a long pause as she sips her coffee.

"We...saw what happened when someone tried to mug you, while you were Christmas shopping. I mean...somebody robbing a blind woman? Of course we were going to intervene, but before we could even cross the street it was obvious you had everything under control. I'm not even going to ask where you learned to fight like that. Anyway, that's why we decided to come to you."

"Aikido." Mary said simply. "It's not practiced much outside of Japan, but I was lucky enough to find an instructor here in the States." She took a sip of her own tea then to hide her expression. Lucky was not how she thought of her association with Sticks. "It focuses on the redirection of force. There are a lot of response options once someone grabs you. It was a good fit for me."

"But I'm not sure how a blind woman fighting off a sloppy mugger who thought I was easy prey makes you think I can do much about kidnappers. Don't get me wrong, I think Grave Investigations can help, but I feel like you aren't telling me everything."
This message was last edited by the player at 16:24, Wed 16 Jan 2019.

"Try me." Mary replied. "You might be surprised what I believe." And here, Mary decided it was time to gamble since Ms. Bowen was clearly reluctant to open up. "For instance, Karen and I have almost managed to track down a young African boy who, if you can believe it, seems to have the ability to disappear. He's believed to be responsible for a number of local thefts in the area."

Of course, there was no such investigation and no such reports. But the way in which the man with Tandy up and vanished like he had lead Mary to believe she could get to the truth of the situation more rapidly by shaking the tree a bit.

The office door swings open by itself. With the sound of an unfurling of a cloak, the young man stands behind Tandy's chair, holding her shoulder protectively.

"You're getting very close," he says with sarcasm and a touch of anger."I told you we couldn't trust her! Let's get out of here, Tandy..."

"Please take a seat young man." Mary said, indicating a spot next to Tandy. "I mean you and yours no harm and the blinds are drawn so no one on the street will happen to see you two together. I hope you will excuse my deceit, but it seemed to me that Ms. Bowen was protecting too many secrets to be entirely open with me. Now, perhaps, we can continue."

Mary didn't wait for the young man to take the offered seat, she simply continued like she expected her instructions to be followed.

"Ms. Bowen, you have said why you chose Grace Investigations, but you have yet to say why you have taken it upon yourself to come to me. Do you know someone who has been taken? Do you have a connection to the kidnappers? Do you have information that you could only have found if one of you could vanish?"

The young man looks to the seat quietly, then back to Mary. He begrudgingly gathers up his cloak so he can take a seat as Tandy continues. Mary senses for an instant something moving inside the cloak that doesn't reflect back any vibrations.

"We knew three of them. Two of them were children. Once we saw it happen. An unmarked black van pulled up. Masked men with guns burst out of the back and snatched him. You'd think they were practicing to take down Al Capone the way there were moving."

The young man interrupts. "Tandy was able to take down one of them before they put the gun to the child's head. They shouted something in a language we didn't understand."

"It sounded like Russian," she continued. "And with their tommy-guns out they would have sprayed everywhere. He may be invisible, but he's not bullet-proof. They pulled their fallen comerade in with them and sped off towards the pier."

Mary pressed the two for a wide variety of details: make a model of the van, number of assailants, where the abduction happened, where all of the abductees were usually located, were their other people that were willing to talk to her, etc... You never knew when a mundane detail might provide unexpected insight.

Then she set her notepad down, making a clear point with her body language that she was not recording what came next.

"Now, if I may take this conversation in a more personal direction, it would seem the two of you are willing to put your own safety at risk to help someone else. It is an unusual and admirable trait, and perhaps encouraged by your... talents. What you do with your time and talents is your own business, and I will not press further. And what I have pressed for I assure you will not leave this room. But I do have to ask, what do you want Grace Investigations to do in this situation? Are you looking for us to locate the kidnappers and notify the police? Are you looking for us to locate the kidnappers and notify you?"

Cloak clears his throat.

"Someone's throwing around a lot of money to make this happen. And that means the people in charge are being paid to look the other way. We want your help, not the law, to locate the kidnappers, put a stop them and free the captives. If you can blow smoke at the authorities afterwards to keep them off our tails, that's a bonus."

Tandy puts down her coffee mug as she looks up at him.

"The last time someone was pulling kids off the street," she continues, "we were caught in the net. And the law never came to our rescue."

"Tandy? Show her..."

Tandy takes a deep breath. She leans forwards and slides the dagger out of her holster. It's very ornate judging from the intricate pattern reflected back to you. Rococo?

"They were killing innocent people for some form of ritual, in front of some massive idol with a head like a squid. We were next in line but...whatever magic they were doing went wrong, for them."

She lets go of the blade, and it floats in the air. It arcs around Mary's desk slowly and returns to her hand.

"I found I could control the very blade they were trying to kill us with... with my mind. And I haven't found anything yet that it can't punch a hole in."

The young man speaks up. "When she stabbed the cloaked man with his own dagger, I tackled him. I knocked him out of his cloak and it surrounded me.The darkness inside it...turned on its last owner. I still don't understand what happened, but..."

He opens his cloak, and your senses again sense a yawning void underneath.

"He fell through and never came out." He closes his cloak.

"You have talents, like us. You've got the blindsight and you've got those Aikido moves! A blind woman trained to kill? Sounds like like some Mata Hari assassin work to me."

Mary's first instinct was to deny it all. She had to do what she did, but no one was supposed to know. She couldn't have some gangster finding out she was the Devil of Hell's Kitchen and then going after Karen to get to her. Karen was just trying to help. But if Mary was being honest with herself, she didn't maintain the secret identity just for others. Without it she would have to be alone, and she couldn't bear the thought.

But she had outed these two, with little concern for their secrets. So how could she not expect the same? Still, she would know how they knew, where she had screwed up. This whole thing was new to her and she was going to make mistakes. But she had to fix those mistakes before someone got hurt.

"You are a troublesome pair, aren't you." she finally said, but there was little condemnation in her voice. "And I hope you aren't implying that I'm going to seduce my way to the answers you want."

She shook her head then. "You aren't going to like this, but the fastest way to put an end to this is wait for the next kidnapping and, instead of breaking it up, follow the kidnappers back to their base. Once we know where these people are hiding we can decide what to do about it."

"Meet me on top of Stella Tower an hour after sunset, tonight. We'll start then. I assume you can manage that without drawing attention to yourselves?"

"I've done worse..." Tandy whispers under her breath.



The young man whirls his cloak around Tandy, and they both vanish.

"W e  c a n . . . "

[End of Scene]