The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

The Best Defense

Previously: "The Loot Box" 

Dylan's suggestion shocks you. That asshole held a knife on you! He was going to stab you in the eyeball!

No, you'd prefer a different strategy, one Dylan mentioned in passing. "What did you mean," you ask him, "when you said they should be more scared of us doing it to them?"

Dylan blinks at you.

"Only what I said," he replies. "If we're scared they're going to do something to us, they should also be scared we'll do it to them. I mean, we've got the book now."

"Well, that's the solution, isn't it?" You turn to Caleb. "We wouldn't have to worry about them if, you know—" You shrug. "If they were fakes."

Caleb's eyes widen, but he says nothing. Neither does Dylan.

But you add nothing to what you've said. You've put the idea out there, and that's enough. It's up to them to respond. You'll go along with whatever they say.

You can tell by his body language—relaxed, with an insolent twist of his shoulders—that Dylan has no problem with what you've said. Maybe Caleb notices too, and decides he's been outvoted even before a vote has been taken. But after sucking long and hard at his lower lip, he says, "Hit or be hit, huh? Yeah, I guess I'd rather do the hitting."

And like that, it's decided.

* * * * *

You'll need more masks and mind-bands, though, so Dylan gives you what money he can spare, and you and Caleb go shopping for supplies. After that, you return to the elementary school to add it to your other loot. You are paranoid enough that you keep watch for anyone who might be following you, and you double back a couple of times, to Caleb's annoyance.

You've got two masks already, but it will take you a week, at least, to cast a third—for you'll need three if you're going to use the golem-goop on Charles and his two friends. But the two masks you have need mind-bands as well, so you cast half a dozen of them (Caleb says it'll be better to have too many than too few) then take them back to Dylan's to work on so there will be three of you waiting should Charles and his friends come by.

"I looked up your friends while I was waiting for you to get back," Dylan tells you after you're spread out on his living room floor. "Two of 'em go to Eastman."

"What friends?" you ask as you chisel another rune into the band you're working on.

"Charles's friends."

"They ain't no friends of ours," Caleb mutters. But you're more troubled by the logistical problem that implies: You're going to have to find some guys you don't know at a school you don't attend.

You point the problem out to Caleb. "We got their names and where they live," he brusquely replies.

"What, are you thinking about breaking into their houses, catching them there?"

"If that's the way we have to do it."

"There's that other friend, or whoever he is, they got at Eastman with them," Dylan says. When you cock a puzzled eyebrow at him, he sighs and digs back into Whitney's trunk. "This guy," he says, pulling out one of the masks. "Rory Taylor Bynum."

"We can't use that," Caleb says. "We told you, it won't obey us."

"I mean, here's someone else you can maybe get to them through. If they have a mask of him, they must be friends with him or something. They can get to him, which means he can get to them."

"We're not going to tell anyone else about this stuff," Caleb says.

"That's not what I meant! I mean, if you made your own copy of him, like they did, you could use his face to get close to them."

"We don't know this guy any better than we know them," you point out.

"Well, at least I can tell you more about him! Your other guys only have the usual dumb x2z stuff, it looks like, in their social media profiles. But I can tell you this Rory guy— Oh my God!"

He scrambles for his cell phone. "He's on the swim team," he says as he shows you the screen. "Check out the speedo."

You look, then flinch. The picture leaves almost nothing to the imagination. The guy is wearing only three articles of clothing from the knees up: a speedo colored like an American flag, a purple bow tie, and a pair of aviator sunglasses. He flashes a shit-eating grin at the camera, and his torso ripples with muscles all over, including an 8-pack.

"Dude," you snicker at Caleb after he's also paled at the photo. "You were sitting on that this morning? When I put on the mask?"

He shoots you a hot look. "You were still in your clothes."

"And you didn't try getting me out of them? Oww!" You laugh and scoot out of reach as Caleb whales at your shoulder.

Silence falls for a minute or two. Then Caleb says, "You know, I bet that's what they were planning to do."

"What?"

"They're in separate schools, right? Whitney goes to the Mutant school, and his two friends go to Eastman. Well, I bet Whitney was going to use these blank masks to get his friends into Xavier's with him. So they could all hang together. And then, if they wanted to hang out together at Eastman, he could do himself up as this other guy."

"Or maybe they were just experimenting on him," you suggest. "Like we were with Jeremy."

"I guess that's true," Caleb admits. "Still." He chews his lip and pulls out the two blank masks. "Maybe we should be thinking of something like that."

"Like what?"

"An impersonation. Slip one of us in for Whitney or one of his friends. Hang out with them, find out what they're up to. Then, if we have to, take them down."

"If we could do that, we could just take 'em down right away," you reply. "Turn 'em into, you know."

"Yeah, but we have to have three masks to do that, and that'll take a week to get ready. We got two masks now. Or we'll have two masks, after we get done with these bands. That's enough to do a substitution, right? We could do it today."

"If we could find one of them today."

And that's the problem with all your plans. Getting to one of these guys, and getting him alone.

* * * * *

It's late afternoon before you are able to get the runes carved into the bands and the bands affixed to the masks.

You also make up some of the new golemizing goop, as Caleb has taken to calling it, so that you'll have it on hand. There's a two-part process to using it. First, you have to copy someone into a mask, after which you coat the inside of the mask with the goop, like the way you have to seal it up. Then you have to burn some hair inside the mask. But whose hair?

Caleb is left scratching his head after reading the description of the spell, and he cusses the Latin, which has to be translated by an online program that keeps insisting on spitting back weird stuff. He also compares it to the spells that make the two types of golem.

"Okay, as near as I can figure," he says, "with this paste stuff, burning the hair into it puts it under the control of whoever's hair it was. So if we burn your hair into it"—he turns to Dylan—"the golem will be controlled by you."

"I've heard that song before," Dylan sneers.

Caleb twists around to stare at the golem that is still standing in the corner. "Whose hair did we use when we made that thing?" he asks.

"I think we used mine," you reply after a moment's thought.

Caleb gives you a narrow stare, then turns to Dylan. "Get that mask of Eva. I want to try something."

It's the golem he wants to try out again, despite Dylan's misgivings. Eva, when she reappears, looks like she's been awake for thirty-six hours and is in need of a steam-cleaning—a girl who was once so alluring now disgusts you. So it is less pleasing than it should be when, with some test commands, you discover that she will obey you, even if reluctantly, but won't obey Caleb or Dylan.

"Well, there's your problem," Caleb concludes after pulling the mask from it. "The golem works just fine. We just didn't know it would obey Will instead of all of us."

Dylan makes like he's going to throttle his cousin. "Okay, so it wasn't defective! You were just incompetent!"

But all that is in the nature of an aside, and you return to the earlier conversation.

The quickest way to safety, it seems to you, is to use the masks on two of three guys you are targeting, and to wait a week (after you've made a third mask) to capture the third.

Caleb points out that as long as the third guy is free, you'll all be in danger. He prefers to make a substitution, putting one of you in for one of the three, to act as a spy. That way, you can learn what, if anything, Whitney and his friends are planning to do and can maybe head it off.

Both plans have one problem: how are you going to get close to any of the three? It's Dylan who suggests using Roxanne. When you reply that Roxanne wants nothing to do with the crisis, he retorts, "So maybe one of us should take her place."

That's all for now.

*
"Table of Contents (Vol. 3)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)"