The First Interbellum (1918-1939)

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

When Robert McLaird had first begun to suspect that something was happening
or might be about to happen in Chicago, he had taken steps to prepare for whatever
it might be. This was difficult because McLaird had had no idea of what it was that
might happen, he was working on vague rumors and his professional 'gut instinct'.

One thing he did do, almost as a matter of routine precaution, was take steps to
make sure that he had access to information from inside the Chicago Police force
and from the Illinois State authorities as well. This was easier said than done,
because it had to be done quietly, in ways that would not reveal to anyone
who might be on the lookout that someone in Army Intelligence had developed a
sudden interest in activities in Chicago. Still, this was something McLaird was
good at, by the time the Aces were in place in Chicago, McLaird had developed a
set of sources within the governments of Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois that
were primed to send news of anything ‘unusual’ to the listening ears of McLaird.

Still, this was less useful than it might have been, because of the above-noted and
pervasive corruption and violence of the time and place. It required some weeks
before someone finally realized, looking at various police and other reports, that
something odd had been happening in the city (and surrounding Cook County) for
weeks or months, and it was another two or three weeks before this information
reached someone who had been engaged to pass it on to Army Intelligence (even
though he had no idea that was actually who he was passing the information to).

By the time McLaird, in turn, sent the information on to Conners and his men in
the field, they had already discovered the theft of the jewels and had begun the
task of recovery. Still, the information went into the puzzle that Conners was in
the process of mentally assembling. This was his way of visualizing the problem,
an intricate jigsaw puzzle with many missing pieces and many oddly shaped bits
as well, which he was in the process of collecting and putting together even as he
put his own plans into motion.

Those plans were necessarily vague, because all Conners and his men knew was
that the actual crown jewels had been stolen and a very skillful replica of the
gems themselves and their display case had been left in their place. This was in
itself a clue, of course. Conners could be reasonably certain that whoever had
pulled off the heist did not want it known that the heist had even happened, or at
least not yet.

Which in turn gave Conners hope (justified, though he had no way to know that)
that the thieves, in turn, might not themselves yet realize that the theft had
been discovered, since no public announcement had been made and those in the
know had been quite careful to show no outward sign of their discovery.

Conners quickly realized, though, that they could not avoid showing some signs
in their changed routines and other activities, so he decided to make use of the
same trick that the thieves had used. He and the Aces, with the assistance of the
Museum staff and some of the other security personnel, arranged their own fake
robbery attempt, to give themselves an excuse for the activities involved in their
actual search for the stolen jewels.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The 'robbery' in question was entirely imaginary, of course. What Conners arranged,
with the help of those of his Aces who were on-scene and some of the other security
personnel involved, was to put out a story that there had been an attempt to rob the
Museum, which had been foiled. Supposedly these would-be robbers had been quite
incompetent, and had managed to escape being captured by sheer luck, without ever
getting very close to any of the really valuable exhibits in the Breymont Museum.

Conners and his associates even arranged to do some superficial damage, to make
the supposed failed robbery more convincing. Then, with the robbery 'foiled',
began to investigation and the man hunt for these would-be perpetrators. The story
even included the entirely mendacious detail that some of the private security
personnel employed by the Museum had been wounded in the attempted robbery.

(In fact, the 'wounded' men were on a long paid leave outside Chicago.)

Of course, this story, once put out in the newspapers, provided a perfect ‘cover’ for
the actual investigation that Conners and his associates were carrying out of the
real robbery, while, Conners hoped, keeping the real thieves from realizing that their
theft had been discovered.

While the false story was being circulated, the real investigation had begun to reveal
some of the story. In the old basement into which the thieves had lowered the display
case and from which they had lifted the duplicate, a concealed entrance was found to
exist, opening onto an old tunnel with rails, part of the underground tunnels network
that underlay that part of Chicago. The tunnel had not been officially used recently,
but had at one time been used to move coal under the streets. It was clear from
disturbances in the dust and dirt that men had recently moved something along those
old rails, and indeed they were able to trace the path that the thieves had taken all the
way to another tunnel, and then to an opening near the docks on Lake Michigan.

Conners had little doubt that from there, the same boat that had brought in the false
display and gems had removed the real items.

Though Conners and his men, and the police and security personnel involved, made
an effort to identify that boat, they knew there was little chance of finding anything
very useful. The sheer number of small craft on Lake Michigan meant that there was
nothing that would make any one of them noticeable to any witnesses who might
otherwise have noticed anything. The legwork was necessary, but offered little in
the way of hope after the passage of that much time.

In the meantime, Conners had assigned Howard Lake a task of his own. Their first
clue had come from the ‘psychic detector’ machine that Lake had constructed, and
Conners suspected that this was still a possibly fruitful line of investigation. Given
that their quarry had displayed such abilities, it seemed probable to Conners that the
enemy would use them again before it was over. Therefore, he assigned Lake to
set up a better, more useful version of the psychic detector apparatus, one that might
give them some warning and information when the enemy again used his strange
‘supernatural’ abilities. Lake had responded by sending back to headquarters for the
original version of the machine.

The machine Lake had built on-the-spot had been based on the same principles, but
it had been a crude lash-up, the machine which had been sitting back in his main
workshop in Miami, Florida (the city where the Seven Aces had their unofficial
headquarters) was more capable, custom made using high end components and with
much greater potential for precision and reliability.

This was a relative difference, of course, considering that Lake was dealing with a
range of phenomena barely recognized even by fringe science and disbelieved in
by the vast majority of the population. The device was experimental, and had been
devised based half on calculation and half on instinct by Lake and his British fellows.
Still, it was the best in the world at what it did, at that time.

Unfortunately, it was neither conveniently compact nor designed to be portable. The
task of shipping it from Miami to Chicago, even using a military priority, required all
too many days and a special train car, and once it arrived in Chicago, it still had to be
assembled and made ready. This was a task only Lake himself was qualified to under-
take, and ended up requiring another two days of sleepless work.

Still, Lake succeeded in getting his machine assembled and running, and as it turned
out, he was just in time, because he detected something within hours of activation.

MORE LATER.

[D10]

Very interesting, Im still wondering what that thing that jurgensen saw was ... atlantean age unity biolab ? and that plant was one of those psyonic vampirism plants ?

Thanks for the food for tought

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by D10

Very interesting, Im still wondering what that thing that jurgensen saw was

At what point? Which incident are you talking about?

[D10]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

At what point? Which incident are you talking about?

When he did that expedition and discovered something weird beneath the island, and had to ask the unity for help, an insland somewhere in the pacific.

The one where only the foreigner sailor would take them, because the locals wouldnt come close the island

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by D10

When he did that expedition and discovered something weird beneath the island, and had to ask the unity for help, an insland somewhere in the pacific.

The one where only the foreigner sailor would take them, because the locals wouldnt come close the island

Oh, that.

Time will tell.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The machine Howard Lake had arranged to have shipped from Miami was more
compact than the temporary version that he had first set up in Chicago. This
permitted him to fit it all into one side of one room of the temporary headquarters
that the Seven Aces had set up on the upper levels of the Breymont Museum.
Still, it was a very large machine, that filled most of its space. The apparatus,
spread across three large metal cabinets and a table full of gauges, was powered by
its own dedicated gasoline generator, which had to be in a different room to avoid
vibration of the relatively delicate equipment in the detector system.

Lake was exhausted by the time he had arranged to bring the machine, assemble it
for use, and tune it and adjust it for operation. However, he had no time to rest,
because within an hour of activation the device suddenly began to sound an alarm.
Lake, who had only just begun to fall asleep on his cot in the next room, found his
rest interrupted by Brady.

“Howie, wake up,” sounded the imperative voice of Brady Joneson.

“Wh-what time is it?!”

“About eleven p.m.,” Brady said. “And your damned gizmo
is going nuts!”

Lake groaned and sat up, his body protesting against each and
every motion. He had found time for no more than four hours
sleep in the previous twenty-four, and now his first rest in that
time was being interrupted.

“What’s it doing?” Lake asked, as he pulled on his shoes and
they headed for the instrument room.

“One of the alarms you installed is ringing, one tone every ten
seconds,” Brady said, as the two men made their way through
the dimly lit corridor toward the instrument room. “And one
of the lights is blinking, the red one. The gauges are all over the
place, but damned if I know what an of them measure!”

“That puts you almost as far along as I am,” Lake said. “We’ve
figured out how to measure something here, but we don’t really
have the slightest idea what that something is!”

Brady and Lake entered the ‘instrument room’, one side of which
was occupied by ‘conventional’ sensors and the other side of
which was filled by the cabinets of the ‘psychic detector’. Amid
the three large metal cabinets, there was an office desk covered
by over a dozen gauges a panel of colored lights. Some of those
gauges were steady, but on others the needles were swinging
back and forth across the scales, and on two of them the needles
were pressed hard against the stops.

Lake sat down and stared at the dials, and at the trail of paper in
a basket to one side, where a track of ink measured some of the
gauge results over the previous few minutes.

“Where’s Nate?” Lake demanded.

“Probably asleep by now,” Brady said. “He said he was going to his
hotel to try and catch some shut-eye since he’s supposed to meet with
the local Bureau man at oh six hundred.”

“Get him over here,” Lake said. “On the double, tell him I think we
have a lead on the location of whoever’s doing this!”

Brady was heading for the phone before Lake finished speaking.

Even as Brady was rousing their chief from his own long-delayed and all too brief
slumber, another man not all that far away was in the process of fighting for his life.

“Damn,” Jurgensen said in a whisper of German, as the shower
of fallen pieces of plaster came to a stop. “That was too close!”

The bullet had missed him, but not by all that much. His usually
well-tuned psychic senses had warned him of the danger, but
only just in time, had had still been in the process of ducking for
cover even as the would-be assassin had squeezed the trigger.
The bullet that would have passed directly through his chest had
instead struck the wall above him, showering him with harmless
plaster, harmless but a reminder of how close he had come!

Jurgensen pulled out his own Luger, but he was aware that there
was a more subtle and potentially more dangerous threat in play
than just the guns of the attacking Rhaemyi. Even as he tried
to see where the attackers were, he felt the distinct sensation of
psychic energies around him, his attackers were striking at him
both physically and mentally, and would have to be fought the
same way if he was to survive the night.

Drawing a breath, he reached out telepathically to call for aid
from his own men, only to find the ether flooded with mental
static, making contact difficult.

“Not good,” he muttered to himself in German. “Not good.”

Jurgensen had been caught alone, walking through the hallways of the hotel that
he had been using, under an alias, during his stay in Chicago. Caught alone, and
by surprise, and his attackers were a Rhaemyi force who had realized that he was
present in person, and decided to try and ‘take him out’ in an assassination attempt
meant to look like an organized crime dispute. The operation had been successful
enough to almost catch Jurgensen by surprise, but now it had gone wrong for
both sides at once.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The assassination attempt against Jurgensen had failed because his psionic faculty,
specifically his personal danger sense, had alerted him, must in time, to the threat.
The Rhaeymi team had attempted to 'mask' their presence from his danger sense,
and had been partially successful. Only a last minute error on their part, a small
misstep in their effort, had enabled Jurgensen to perceive the threat, with no more
than seconds to spare. [1]

The error had happened, however, and Jurgensen had managed to duck out of the
way just in time. Now both Jurgensen and his would-be assassins were both faced
with the danger of the situation escalating out of the control of either side. Already
the noise had drawn attention from others in the hotel, and even in Chicago at that
time, it could only be a matter of a very short time before the uproar drew attention
from the police. This was something that neither side wanted to see happen.

Jurgensen knew that his attackers would be looking for a way to
retreat, but that did not mean that they would pass up a chance to
kill him if he gave them the chance in the next few moments. He
had some minor cover, he had managed to duck around a corner
from his attackers, but he could hear them and ‘sense’ them with
his own espersenses. Even through the cloud of psychic ‘static’
filling the ether, it was easy to sense the growing ripples of panic
and confusion as the sound of gunshots sent the inhabitants of the
hotel into a panic.

Jurgensen looked around him, heart pounding, the taste of fear in
his throat. He had been making his way toward the elevator to go
out, but now he was cut off. They were on the fifth floor of the
hotel, and the elevators were beyond where he thought his attackers
were waiting. The stairwell was between him and his foes, but there
was no cover, he would have been exposed to a wide field of fire
during a dash for the stairwell. His enemies would have several
seconds to shoot at him and that at a range short enough that they
could not realistically be expected to miss.

Think, Jurgensen commanded himself sternly, think! You
are smarter than these scum, use your head!

After what seemed like an eternity, but which Jurgensen knew to
be no more than a couple of seconds, Jurgensen saw a way, or at
least a possible way. Though the elevators and stairs might as
well have been in another country, the windows in the long
hallway were just a meter or two away and out of the line of fire.

Unfortunately, beyond the windows was a twenty meter drop, and
the fire escape was not accessible from where he crouched.

If this attack is just these few twits, Jurgensen said to himself,
a mixture of anger, fear, and contempt animating his thoughts,
then maybe...but if they have someone watching the hotel from
outside, I’ll be a sitting duck...

After another moment, Jurgensen realized that he had no choice
but to take the risk, time was fast running out. With a twist of
fear in his stomach, Jurgensen knew he was going to have to go
by the windows, with the risks that route entailed.

I need a distraction, Jurgensen thought savagely to himself,
something to keep eyes and ears off me, and that being the
case, I think these brutes will serve my needs admirably.

With the experience of decades, Jurgensen had routinely noted
his physical surroundings as he walked down the corridor prior
to the attack, something that he did so automatically that most
of the time he was not even aware he was doing it.

Jurgensen now used his psychokinetic talent to reach out to the
thick wallpaper on the wall of the corridor, finding it with his
espersense as the Unity had so carefully taught him. The steady
flood of psychic static from the enemy was making this much
more difficult than it would have normally been, but Jurgensen
had both considerable strength and extensive training. He was
also possessed of a great deal of practical experience in making
use of that strength and training.

Thus it was harder than it might have been, but Jurgensen was
able to lock his power onto the thick, decorative wallpaper on
the walls, and then he poured energy into that material, again
as he had been taught by the Unity. The wallpaper was made
of a material chosen more for aesthetics than safety, and after
a moment of effort Jurgensen succeeded in igniting it!

As Jurgensen had intended, the flames immediately swept up
and down the corridor, catching of the Rhaemyi men before he
could react. He had been leaning against the wall, and as the
wallpaper ignited the flames leapt into his clothing, forcing
his partner to turn his attention to assisting his colleague.

Jurgensen wasted no more time, the heat from the flames was
already filling the air and the smoke was making visibility
fall, Jurgensen lashed out again with his psychokinesis, and
he shattered a window, and with an effort of will he ran for it
and jumped through!

Now came the hardest part! He had to break his fall or else he
would strike the street below at a lethal velocity. He was using
his psychokinetic power to try and slow himself from the first
instant he left the window, all other thoughts gone from his
mind for the moment. The assassins, the fire, and possibility
of police interference, he banished all such considerations from
his mind, focusing his full attention and with it his full native
power on the single task of surviving a fifteen meter drop!

If he had not already been tired from his previous efforts and
fighting the static, and if he had been granted another second or
two, he might well have landed safely and walked away. As it
was, he managed to reduce his own velocity sufficiently that
when he struck the ground, he was not instantly killed.

He did, however, let out a scream as his world dissolved into
raw agony, pain banishing fear on impact. He was only half
aware that others had moved to pick him up and move him
amid his agony.

What had happened was that on impact, Jurgensen had still been moving just fast
enough, and had landed in such a way as to break his left arm and several fingers
of his left hand, and to knock his left shoulder out of its socket.

Fortunately for Jurgensen, some of his men had arrived in time to rescue him as he
landed, moving him to safety amid the chaos as others jumped to escape the flames.
These latter unfortunates, lacking the advantage of psychokinetic power to slow
their falls, mostly fared far worse than Karl Jurgensen upon reaching the ground.

The Rhaemyi men, like Jurgensen, escaped. One was badly burned, both suffered
from smoke inhalation and other lesser problems, but they too had the advantage
of psionic powers, training, and knowledge that enabled them to make their own
way out, amid the milling confusion of fire fighters, police, and terrified escapees
or fascinated civilians onlookers.

The entire incident took no more than a few minutes, but the enormous amount of
psionic power used by the attackers and Jurgensen in their encounter, or afterward
in the process of escaping, make the detector apparatus at the museum react with
the intensity that so surprised Howard Lake.

In the meantime, the hotel was aflame, and by the time the fire fighters managed to
bring the conflagration under control, six people were dead and dozens suffered
a variety of injuries, ranging from the minor to the ghastly.

Some few hours after the fire was out, several members of the Seven Aces arrived
on the scene, drawn by the coincidence of the detection event with the machine and
the timing of the hotel fire.

MORE LATER.


[1] The psychic power being used to try to ‘jam’ the Danger Sense possessed
by Jurgensen had generated quite a bit of side-static energy, which was one of the
things detected that the warning system Lake had built at the museum.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

By the time Nathaniel Conners had been wakened and gathered his men, the detector
had gone silent again. Still, they had the strip of graph paper, with its machine-
scrawled lines of ink that indicated that something had been happening, for a
few minutes. Howard Lake even informed his team mates that this had been, by
a large margin, the most intense detection event he had seen since helping to make
the psychic detector in the first place. [1]

The entire event appeared to have lasted no more than five minutes, if that, and the
device was not accurate enough to be sure it was not shorter yet.

When news had arrived that a nearby hotel was on fire, the Aces had been struck
by the precision of the timing, as far as the accuracy of their machine would allow
them to ascertain that fact. As far as they could discern, the conflagration at the
hotel had erupted at exactly the same time that their detector had begun ringing
its alarms and printing its trace of psychic activity. That did not prove anything
in itself, of course, but the apparent coincidence seemed worthy of investigation.

Thus is was that several members of the Seven Aces spent time interviewing some
of the people involved in the hotel fire. Under the protection of various ‘covers’,
they spoke with fire fighters, police officers, medical personnel, survivors among
the staff and guests of the hospital, and such witnesses as were willing to talk to
them. It was classic ‘legwork’, time-consuming, mostly useless, but necessary,
and as it happened the Aces benefited from a piece of good fortune.

It seemed that several witnesses told versions of a story that seemed on its face to
be unbelievable. People in the streets below the hotel, or watching from a nearby
restaurant, had reported that one man had emerged from a window, just as the
fire had begun to blaze across the fifth floor, ahead of the other people who had
been forced to jump for safety. Exactly what this man had done was rather vague,
unfortunately. Different people had different versions of what had happened, but
all seemed to indicate that he had not fallen to the ground in the normal way.

One man reported that the individual in question had flown to the ground and
land and walked away unharmed. Another said he ‘drifted down’ like a feather or
a snowflake in the breeze. Two people reported that he fell, and that his fall was
normal enough except that he fell too slowly. Unfortunately, these last two
witnesses disagreed on the gender of the person in question, and one reported that
the woman had been injured on landing and the other that the man had simply hit
the ground, gotten up, and walked away.

This confusion did not disprove anything, of course. By this time, the Seven Aces
were all too familiar with the multiple sincere versions of the same event that had
a tendency to emerge from multiple witnesses. This was especially true if the
event had involved a great deal of confusion, emotion, or noise and confusion. The
core of the narrative, however, might have been dismissed by most because it made
so little sense in ordinary terms.

The Seven Aces, however, were all too aware that there were many more strange
things going on in the world than most people suspected. Based on things they had
been told about in their training, and had actually encountered in the course of
some of their previous missions, they knew that there really were people in the world
who could such inexplicable things as slow their fall through the air without any
visible means of support. That was, in fact, rather a mild application of the abilities
they knew certain people to possess, other than the scale of the event. [2]

When considered in light of the psychic activity detected by their machine earlier, it
was no great stretch for the Seven Aces to assume that the strange story held some
degree or germ of truth. From there, it was not a difficult matter to look at the record
of registrations in the hotel, compare it to the list of people still unaccounted for after
the fire, and narrow down a list of names or pseudonyms for further investigation.

In fact, this list was not very long, less than a dozen names remained unaccounted for
after twenty-four hours. Several bodies had been burned beyond recognition and it
was a safe assumption that at least some of the names on the list would match up
with those corpses with the passage of time.

Within that same period, however, one name became unusually interesting to the Aces.
That name, from the list of unaccounted for guests, was ‘Alvin Stanel’.

MORE LATER.


[1] Of course, that was measuring against a very small baseline of detections.

[2] While it was not a tremendous thing for a psychokinetic to be able to slow
his or her fall, to slow a five-story drop sufficiently to survive it was impressive.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The Aces identified 'Alvin Stanel' mostly by process of comparison and elimination.
Of the various 'unaccounted for' names on the list, Alvin Stanel looked interesting
for a number of reasons.

To begin with, he had been using a room on the fifth floor, near where the fire was
known to have begun. He was from out of town, and what background was to be
found indicated that he was a scholar, who had been visiting the University of
Chicago as part of an academic conference, yet when the Aces checked the matter
out, they discovered that his supposed connections to the University of Leeds were
in fact false. Someone had done a creditable job of preparing fake credentials, and
arranging corroborating support, but it had been aimed to deceiving the academics
of the University of Chicago. When checked out by the Army through its own
channels, the false identity had been relatively thin.

Further checks had indicated that ‘Stanel’ had been a historian, supposedly he had
specialized in esoteric history and exotic languages. This seemed to the Aces to
be a slightly improbable thing to inspire someone to create an illegal and complex
false identity, drawing them further down the trail of ‘Alvin Stanel’.

In the meantime, the psychic energy detector, which had been calm for some hours
after the hotel fire, because to register activity again. This time the signal seemed
to be much less intense, but it was steady and went on hour after hour. This was
far too faint a ‘signal’ to easily trace, and the detector was too bulky to be used in
‘triangulating’ the detection. Still, it was an indication that something, some
actor, was using psychic power not too very far away.

In fact, what the detector was picking up was the ongoing effort on the part of Karl
Jurgensen and his psionically talented associates to accelerate his healing processes.

Jurgensen had been taken by his men to one of their prearranged ‘safe houses’, and
there Jurgensen had been dosed with enough painkillers to be able to think and
speak coherently. The timing of his injury could not have been worse, from his
point of view, he was in the middle of a very complex, multi-tiered operation and
the last thing he needed was the physical disability he was now dealing with. One
of the first things he did was to assemble some of his psionically-potent minions,
and organize those with the right talents and skills into a gestalt to assist him in the
healing of his wounds.

Psychic power is not magical, and even with the considerable strength possessed by
the group, all they could do was accelerate the healing process, and assist it. What
would have been wounds and damage that would have needed months to heal could
be assisted to heal in a matter of days or weeks, but no faster, and at a high cost in
energy and effort. It forced Jurgensen to divert talented psions from other important
work to the task of healing himself, and, though he did not realize this, it was making
him and his remarkably detectable to certain individuals with the right instruments.

Along with the low, steady ‘signal’ the detector was picking up from Jurgensen and
his gestalt, ever now and then Lake would pick up something much more intense, a
tremendous spike of activity that would send the gauges slamming against their stops
and the pen running wildly up and down the trailing graph paper...for a few moments.
Then the signal would drop back to the low, steady ‘hum’ that had been present for
hours. These signal spikes seemed to happen almost at random, or so it seemed to
Howard Lake, who had no real idea of exactly what any of his results meant just yet.

One thing that unnerved Lake was what he thought the proximity must be. As far as
he could see, such intensity indicated that the brief spikes had to be occurring very
close at hand, because otherwise the implied power seemed improbable or impossible.
Yet there was no indication of anything untoward anywhere around the Museum at the
time of the activity spikes. The absence of anything was almost more unnerving than
some real threat or problem would have been.

In point of fact, these sudden, extremely intense spikes were not close at hand at all, in
some cases the machine was picking them up from across the city. Lake had reached
the wrong conclusion, the users of that power were not close by, but they did have
a level of psychic ability out of the experience of the Seven Aces or their teachers in
the British apparat. The sudden power spikes were the doing, mostly, of Zadatharion.

MORE LATER.