And I’m plot /
PLOT SEEDING…

===December 17===

===8:20 PM===

There are hills to the west of town; just beyond the dilapidated rail yards adjacent to Shade Industries. There, overlooking the town and the surrounding hills with a vista that some would consider beautiful if visited during less interesting times, rested Hilario Vandenbergh. Reading a novel. In front of a cave.

Marcus Shade, frazzled and limping, a Shade with the weight of two worlds on his shoulders, crept up the side of Vandenbergh’s hill. It was a difficult climb; Shade’s last 48 hours had been a veritable roller coaster of action and thrills. To his dismay, the final instructions from Mr. Vandenbergh had been to ascend this useless hump of dirt and deliver him the Black Swan.

Hilario struck an odd sight; even the bitterly cynical Shade of times future had to admit that. There he sat: mustache, impeccably starched shirt, combed and trimmed beard, tall hat, cane at his side; all in the middle of an encampment that seemed to be a relic of the American Civil War. If Shade had stopped to think about it, he would have sworn he could smell coffee brewing in the narrow metal pot sitting atop the fire and a whiff of gunpowder in the air. But a man’s imagination can get the better of him when confronting the weird.

“You look like the model of comfort. And here I am, all banged up.”

Hilario looked up; he laughed. Shade’s blood boiled.

“I hope you don’t find this so funny very much longer.”

Vandenbergh stood up, closing the middle three buttons on his five button coat.

“No, no, my boy; it’s merely that you appear to have had a productive day. I trust you have returned with all of our…requisite materials?”

That was a damn lie. Hilario Vandenbergh doesn’t trust, he knows. He knows because Hilario Vandenbergh has a reputation as someone not to be disappointed. He knows that if Shade didn’t have exactly what he wanted, Shade would have high-tailed it into the first parallel dimension DDF could fling open for him as part of their infamous cross-chronographical witness protection program.

“Yeah.” Shade sized up his relatively new employer. “I got it. But I don’t see what good it’ll do you out here in the woods.”

Hilario smiled. “How quaint of you, Mr. Shade. How quaint.”

And together they walked back into the cave; receding into the dark of the earth.

An elevator ride. Ding. A long hallway. An expensive but Spartan research facility; and, in the middle of a cavern some hundred meters below the graveyard above, steeped in an artificial light ricocheting this way and that off of the grotto ceiling and cave walls, held aloft on a platform of unbefitting quality, lay Hilario Vandenbergh’s answer to the Antarctica device. His loud, thunderous answer.

* * *

MEANWHILE, as the North Atlantic of the cobalt orb that is humanity’s home spins below, a meteor is falling to earth.