Mister Mystery gazed out over the rooftops of his city at midnight, an expression of grim determination on his face. Below him lay a sprawling metropolis of five million souls, and all too many soulless monsters that preyed upon them. They would learn, he vowed, whose city this was. By the time he finished with them, they would be begging to spread the word about Mister Mystery.
Tonight, though, he didn't need them to tell others about him. He needed the scum of Macropolis to open their shrunken, black hearts to him and give him all the information they had about the sinister temptress, Vita Brevis. She was out there, he knew, somewhere in the city. She'd kidnapped Lucinda Love, heiress to the Love media fortune. The ransom note had already been delivered, but Mister Mystery knew his old enemy enough to know that it was nothing more than a decoy. It would fool the police, of course--Captain O'Rourke was a good cop, but he was used to dealing with ordinary criminals. He knew the way their minds worked. Vita would count on that.
No, Vita's plan was far more subtle. Far more insidious. She would allow the police to trace the ransom note. Not too quickly, of course; the cops would take days deciphering the seemingly accidental clues that the wrinkled piece of paper held for them. But trace it they would, and in the end, they'd rescue the innocent Lucinda from Vita's foul clutches. With Vita, of course, barely escaping in the confusion. Well done, officers. Medals all around.
But Mister Mystery knew Vita's true plan. She'd hidden her tracks well--a series of bizarre, seemingly unrelated thefts around the city in the months leading up to the kidnapping attracted no attention to Vita, not for the average detective. They wouldn't even connect it to the Love kidnapping. But the details of those crimes stood out to Mister Mystery's impeccably trained deductive genius like a beacon in the darkness of the criminal mind, marking Vita Brevis as their architect as surely as if she'd left her signature. She'd been assembling a brainwashing device, a masterwork of technology far beyond the skills of any but a mad genius like herself.
Mister Mystery could just picture it. Lucinda, sweet, innocent Lucinda, playing the role of damsel in distress so perfectly that she believes it herself. The police rescue her, and she weeps tears of true gratitude before being returned to the bosom of her beloved family. A few weeks later, her father dies of sudden and inexplicable heart failure. Then her fiancé, actor Kevin Charles, perishes in a mysterious 'accident', leaving Lucinda in control of the Love movie studios, and all the profits thereof...and she takes advantage of that control to siphon funds off to Vita Brevis, while secretly submitting to Vita's decadent pleasures. The perfect crime. Why take a pittance of a ransom when you can have it all, and with no-one the wiser?
No-one except Mister Mystery, of course. But now, the clock was ticking. He had to find Vita's secret laboratory, and he had to do it before Lucinda's will broke and her delicate, nymph-like body became Vita Brevis' submissive plaything. And finding Vita meant getting the criminal element of his city to talk.
He looked down, into the alleyway below him. Three young men lurked behind the trash cans, laughing and joking in the manner of arrogant young toughs the world over. Mister Mystery smiled. Sometimes, his city was good to him. He hooked his grapple-cable onto the ledge, and slowly, silently descended down towards the three punks below.
*****
Lucy woke up with a pounding, throbbing headache. The light in the room felt agonizingly bright, and her eyes felt like they took too long to focus. But when they finally did, she saw that she was in a hospital bed. She looked down. She was wearing a thin smock that barely covered her lithe body, and her wrists and ankles were secured to the bed with thick leather straps. She tried to move her hand a little, just experimentally, and noticed the I.V. tube leading into her wrist as she tugged at the straps. They didn't give.
There was a woman with long black hair standing there, wearing a white coat over a green smock and holding a syringe. "Ah," she said, "I see you're awake again. That's a very good sign. You had me quite worried, young lady."
Lucy blinked. "I don't...I don't understand," she said, her mouth feeling unpleasantly thick with half-dried saliva. "What happened? Where am I? Why am I in these?" She jerked at her restraints, suddenly panicked.
"Please calm down," the woman said. "There was an accident at the studio. You suffered a severe concussion, and we had to bring you here to the hospital. You've been in and out of consciousness several times during the last forty-eight hours."
"I don't remember any of that," Lucy said angrily. Her head still throbbed like a gong that had been rung several minutes ago, but was still gently quivering.
"No," the woman said, smiling gently, "you wouldn't. That's generally one of the signs of a severe concussion. But during the periods you were conscious, you tried several times to leave the hospital. We had to restrain you for your own safety."
Lucy tried to sit up, but the restraints and the sickening head-rush she got whenever she moved too fast convinced her to lie still. "Well, I'm awake now, so you can go ahead and take them off."
The woman smiled. It was an irritatingly bland smile, like she was used to hearing irrational requests like that, and to humoring the people who made them. "I'm not sure that we want to do that just yet, dear," she said. "But I'll certainly speak to the doctor about it. In the meanwhile, you just try to rest. Your friends have been very worried about you. They're waiting outside right now."
"Friends?" Lucy said eagerly, a sudden wave of relief coursing through her body. Somehow, she felt intensely relieved knowing that she wasn't alone here after all. She still felt so groggy and disoriented, but she had friends here. She was safe here. "Can I see them?"
The woman's next words dashed her hopes. "Maybe once you've recovered a bit more," she said, the bland smile still fixed to her face like a mask. "We don't want you over-exerting yourself just yet, do we?"
Lucy felt a rush of sudden, irrational terror. She couldn't remember how she got here, she couldn't leave, and they weren't letting her see anyone... "Please," she said plaintively. "Just ask the doctor if it would be alright to let them in, just for a minute or two."
The woman looked down at her for a long moment, then nodded. "I'll go ask. In the meanwhile, you just try to rest, okay?"
Lucy nodded enthusiastically...or at least, she did until the sensation made her want to vomit. Then she sagged back onto the pillows, waiting for the world to stop spinning.
It seemed like forever, lying there on the bed with absolutely nothing to do. She couldn't even scratch herself, and the moment she thought of that her butt developed an itch that absolutely would not go away. It felt like some sort of bizarre torture, and she only prayed that whoever her doctor was, he'd let her out of this thing once she convinced him she wasn't about to run away. That wasn't too much to ask, was it?
After what felt like an eternity, the door finally opened to reveal the woman once more. "Now you can only stay for a few minutes," she was saying as she walked into the room. "She's still very weak."
"I understand, ma'am," the man behind her said. "Thank you for letting us see her." Lucy looked at him, and at the Asian woman next to him, and her heart sank. These people weren't her friends at all.
