The Taco Hut has been cleaned up and re-opened by one Fred Johnson, a third-generation Mexican-American determined to buy super-hero insurance. B and B Rents Tents has been busy lately due to news coverage of the row at neighboring Taco Hut, and the holiday parties don’t hurt.

Our heroes (Mist, Phantasm, Phantashia) check out the abandoned Studebaker factory (Dr. Jackal slept here). Mist goes though a wall desolid but is blasted through a window (closed, darnit) by a baseball-sized security drone, which our heroes smash. Then they notice the tide is coming-in – indoors yet. The heroes get outside, all right, but why would the Studebaker plant get flooded—with seawater?

Using extraordinary (for heroes) cleverness, and a helpful DPW employee, the heroes trace the water flow and find that old sewer lines have been used to take water from the Chittendon Lochs and put it into the plant, which had been made watertight.

Phantasm discovers vehicle tracks from the shore to the lochs, which have been scraped or vacuumed clean.

Before he can be questioned, old Mitch Gainor, Loch Foreman, commits suicide via cyanide in his molar. When the heroes check out his nautically-decorated house, they find a small amount of Q in a hidden safe. A picture of a white-haired blonde girl on Mitch’s desk looks to Phantasm to be Radion—it’s quite a match. Radion is the nuclear villain he fought outside of Taco Hut a few weeks ago, the one who grabbed Hacker’s discs.

There is an empty bedroom upstairs, decorated as if for a high-school girl. Checking out her school (Millard Fillmore High) they find she hasn’t been there since October, although her room at home has been kept up rather nicely.

There is a note to “meet Mary at 3:00 Sunday”. Mary is Mitch’s daughter, and she could be Radion.

The heroes decide that the Lochs were used to grow some kind of algae on gunk that the makers of Q would get via some special vehicle. The Loch waters would flood the watertight plant.

Why go to all that trouble to use Lochs?

What was Mitch Gainor’s involvement?

Is Mary really Radion? Is she being blackmailed?

Where is she? Who set all this up?

These and other exciting questions—next time!