From there, the day turned into planning sessions, the first with those of us who hadn't been drugged. By the afternoon, even those of us who had been drugged were with it enough to participate.

From there, it grew into a cast of thousands or at least it felt like it. We had everyone—Amy, Tara, Samita, Rod, Alex, Brooke, Jenny, Sean, Dayton, every member of the original Justice Fist but Jody, and every living member of our original group. If that weren't enough, Dr. Transylvania, Ape Nasty, Prime, and his second-in-command attended remotely.

They weren't the only ones attending remotely, but every time my eyes flicked over to that corner of the big screen on our wall, it felt like I'd flipped to another station.

That feeling compounded when I noticed the other two guests, the AIs. One screen flipped between a multi-colored spray of pixels and, inexplicably, the early, 8-bit version of Mario, the one from Donkey Kong. The other appeared to be live footage of a bronze robot and a strange, steam-powered engine.

Their appearance left me with questions that it wasn't time to ask, like, "Why Mario? Why that version?" Also, "Is that a working version of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine or simply CGI?"

Despite my curiosity, I didn't ask, and the meetings went efficiently. Haley and the others presented the information we had and outlined their plan. Overall, with changes based on our new resources, it stayed the same.

As Haley put it, "They have an international organization full of experienced mercenaries, supervillains, alien technology, and more than a thousand professional soldiers on that island alone. That doesn't even include Magnus. We don't stand a chance in a straight fight, but Magnus isn't a threat if he loses the device.

"The Rocket and Ghost can sense the device, and if we can get them into the main building to find Magnus and the Galaxy Core Device's entrance, we can win this. To make it through, they'll have to go with a team, and we'll have to lock down all the other buildings so that Magnus doesn't get reinforcements."

Dr. Transylvania said, "We'll go in first. My people have ways of getting into places without being seen. Ape Nasty will go in with Prime and his people."

The giant gorilla smiled, and I reflected on what big teeth he had. "This isn't a 'Don't kill anybody' mission, is it? Because if it is, you're going to be disappointed."

Izzy shook her head.

"I wish it could be," I said, "but I don't think it's possible. Let's put it this way: don't go out of your way to do it. Take people's surrender if it's not a trick. Use your best judgment."

Ape Nasty's jaw dropped in what appeared to be a smile, "Excellent. It's nice to see you be reasonable."

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Dr. Transylvania glanced off to the left of his screen, where I assumed that Ape Nasty was in reality. "Nasty," he said, "don't get out of control or you will have to answer to me."

Ape Nasty eyed something off the screen to his right, "Sure thing, boss. I don't want to get these young, upstanding superheroes in trouble."

Both Jaclyn and Izzy looked over at me, Jaclyn shaking her head this time. And yes, I did get the message. I had invited some of the world's most infamous supervillains to fight by our side.

Amy and Vaughn both laughed while Haley moved the meeting forward, addressing Hal, "While we're going into the island, what will the AIs be doing?"

"We'll have a multi-faceted approach. First of all, we're already distracting the Nine's heavy social media users with arguments and distractions that they can't ignore. In addition to that, we're infiltrating the Nine's computer systems and plan to engineer conveniently timed outages of resources to make it difficult for them to attack you or even notice your arrival. Finally, we'll be retrieving as much information from their systems as possible."

On his screen, Mario jumped over a barrel.

The conversation moved from there to where our exact landing spots should be, which clusters of guards would be attacked first, and who would handle each building.

Between Tara's calculations, Daniel's prescience, and Hal being designed to plan battles, it came together within a couple of hours, except…

Tara stared up at the screen, which showed a picture of the island with markers for our people, the Nine's troops, and other points of interest, and said, "There's just one thing that bothers me about this plan. There's a 25% chance, according to the Mystic, that we haven't accounted for all the possible sources of teleporting in reinforcements. What happens then?"

Daniel closed his eyes, saying nothing for a minute, and then his eyes popped open. "It's not good. Most of the time, we all die."

Tara nodded, "That's what I thought, but," and here she smiled, "I have a solution. Remember my internship? Control and I inventoried everything, including all the storage rooms and also the downstairs shelter."

I knew where she was going with this. We didn't use it much, but below the main floor where we ran the League, we had another level. I'd always thought of it as Grandpa's Giant Fallout Shelter. The League came into being near the beginning of the Cold War and disbanded a few years before it ended. Grandpa created a block of rooms for the League's families and friends to live in case of nuclear war.

Complete with dried foods that were now well past their expiration date, it waited for us, still ready if dustier than anyplace I'd want to live.

After the war, where the League and the Xiniti had destroyed the last of the Abominators, though, the League had stored the worst of the Abominators' weapons in HQ's special storage room, but the merely normally dangerous had been stored in the shelter. By "normally dangerous," I mean weapons commonly used in the Human Ascendancy and by the Galactic Alliance.

"What we should do," Tara continued, "is pull what we safely can from the storage room here and supplement it with weapons from the shelter. Captain Commando can use her Citizen's Mark to assign permission to use them to anyone with an implant, which is almost everyone. It will work."

To Daniel, she said, "How does that affect the odds?"

Daniel closed his eyes again, opening them to say, "The possibilities get weirder, but depending on events, our chances of survival become better than 60%."

Tara's face changed from the flat, emotionless expression she settled into while analyzing to a bright smile that reminded me that she could model if she wanted. "See, it works!"

Sean's brow furrowed, "Implants? Does everybody have them now? I thought that was a Xiniti thing. Can Dayton have one? He shouldn't have to go up against those guys carrying knives."

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