The continued adventures of Extendy Enna, esq.

Two years ago, the world was turned upside-down by the revelation that demigods walked among the rest of us. In the wake of that revelation (as well as the unfortunate holiday party incident), you moved from California to Seattle, one of the growing epicenters of superpowered activity, to practice law on the front lines of vigilantism and powered criminals as a public defender.

Your ex-boyfriend Dave is henching for a man calling himself the King of Seattle; your first superpowered client, the Silent Siren, jumped bail; you were placed on extended administrative leave from your job; and Seattle has erupted into open street warfare between the National Guard, vigilante heroes, and the forces of the two rival monarchs claiming rightful rulership over Seattle – the King and the Emperor. The supposed "hero" Lady Light tried to throw you into a woodchipper; and you have a homeless teenage superhero, the Seattle Squidbat, living upstairs in your new office.

The near-death experience left you with a superpower: You can elongate parts of your body. Conservation of mass is a bitch and a half, but for some inexplicable reason, skin-tight clothing and jewelry stretch along with you. You haven't told your mother any of this. Instead, she thinks you're engaged to be married.

Who are you? Enna Deren, esquire.
"I would be pleased you studied my decrees. However, I see you wear a ring that resembles quite closely one which was stolen by the pretender, which marks you as his pawn. I will not be moved by his pawns again."

Emperor Redford I of Seattle sighs deeply, shaking his head. His impossibly well-defined pectoral muscles glisten as they rise and fall, framed by alternating red and gold ruffles.

"I doubt that he has let the original out of his treasure room, but whether it is the genuine article or a decoy, I know you must have it from him," he says after a moment. "You may explain yourself, and how you have come from him."

You take a deep breath. "I haven't been able to take this ring off," you say, spreading the fingers of your right hand wide. You tug tentatively at the golden snake wrapped around your ring finger, looking carefully at its ruby eyes, the large emerald making up most of its head, and the little diamond teeth. "I woke up wearing it. He didn't give me any choice, just decided to mark me with it. He's a horrible man."

You shake your head. A horrible man with a gorgeous tenor voice. The man calling himself the King of Seattle sounds almost as gorgeous as Emperor Redford looks, you think to yourself, your eyes drifting to the exposed imperial pectoral muscles.

"He was impressed with my singing," you add, taking a deep breath before launching into song. "There was an inventor in Seattle-"

The emperor frowns, making a short sharp gesture. He's not impressed. You shut your mouth.

"Strangely enough, I believe her," Redford I of Seattle says. "He has terrible tastes. I will assign you a guard. Mateo, you will protect her from Lady Light and get to the bottom of this matter of the pretender's plans for her."

A thin dandy of a man festooned with lace steps forward and takes hold of your hand in a motion so quick and deft that he must be a super. A half-second later, his red cape settles back down over the hilt of his sword, a long basket-hilted affair that you'd assumed was some kind of costume piece.

"It is difficult to be sure if it is the original or a copy, Your Imperial Highness. The pretender is skilled in physical fabrications," Meteo says, looking carefully. "It shows enough distress to be close to two centuries old. Perhaps too much, though I have not laid eyes directly on the original."

While wearing this ring, you've been submerged in salt water for an extended period of time, run over by a motorboat, captured and interrogated by the Crimson Guard, been beaten up by both the Gray Knight and the Lady Light, been thrown into a woodchipper by said Lady Light… you even got your fingers stuck in a bowling ball and fell over while you were out bowling with Jake. You wouldn't be surprised if the ring has been damaged since it was put on your finger.

The glint of a knife appearing like magic in Mateo's hand draws your attention back to the present. "Miss, I asked if you were ready for me to remove the ring. It will be easy to reattach the finger afterwards."

You step back involuntarily, your eyes flying over to look at Emperor Redford I. You feel a strange impulse to say yes in order to please the beautiful man sprawled across his throne, but with an effort of will, you force the foreign impulse out of your head. The courtiers whisper to each other.

What do you do about the man with the shiny knife who wants to cut your finger off in order to remove the ring?

[] Tell Mateo to go ahead and chop your finger off.
[] Tell Mateo he's your bodyguard, not your surgeon. You'll stop at a jeweler's later to get the ring off.
[] Try prying really hard. It's a coiled gold ring, not a surgically implanted decoration.
[] Punch Mateo in the face.
[] (write-in)

What's your next priority now that you've got a bodyguard on duty to protect you against Lady Light?

[] Get a second date with Jake.
[] Try to start lining up clients for your practice.
[] Help Mateo get at Prince Tenor, aka "the pretender," aka "King of Seattle."
[] Try to figure out where your former client (the Silent Siren) went after skipping bail.
[] (write-in)

Quest information
Dossier:
People without known powers:
Key items, places, and equipment

"You're my bodyguard, not my surgeon," you say flatly, pulling your hand back. "I'm sure a jeweler can figure out how to get it off my finger without causing permanent harm."

A disappointed look flits across his face. "Miss, I assure you I am a qualified chirurgeon and natural philosopher," he says. "I also paint landscapes passably well."

He's probably telling the truth, but you just can't seem to get a read on him. He's slippery.

***

"Excellent reproduction," the jeweler says. "Astonishing, really, modern cuts would do the stones better justice, but I'm impressed by your fiance and your original jeweler alike. I've seen the original at the V&A myself. I doubt Albert himself could tell the difference. Could you tell me who made it?"

"I'm not here for an appraisal, I just want help getting this off my finger," you say, shaking your head. "Without damaging it. Or my finger."

The jeweler ignores you for a moment, flashing the blacklight on his loupe and muttering under his breath as he stares at the ring. You clear your throat.

"Oh. Yes, sorry. It's just such an incredible piece to see up close and personal like this. The gems aren't synthetic, by the way. It must have cost quite a pretty penny. Your fiance must have wanted to surprise you, but with a ring like this, you really should have taken measurements." He tsks at Mateo, and then pulls out a silk ribbon and begins wrapping it around your finger. "And you'll be wanting this resized, I imagine?"

You bite your tongue for a moment, glancing over at the glowering Mateo. You decide that if you let your mother assume you were engaged, you can let a jeweler make a similarly incorrect assumption. Once the silk ribbon is between your skin and the ring, it proves easy enough to slip the ring over your knuckle. The tricky part, given the coiling-snake design of the ring, is doing so without bending the soft gold of the ring.

***

Your thumbs fly furiously as you finish a long text to Midori, filling her in on the important details from yesterday - namely, that you now have a bodyguard in tow who is apparently a high-ranking super in the Crimson Court.


"Amanda Norman" is the fake name that you gave the hospital in Snoqualmie after the woodchipper incident. Your stump twinges at the reminder, and you adjust your prosthetic foot. Jake is trying to warn you without getting himself in trouble. Depending on what's in the record and what his chief thinks, he might get an order to take you in for questioning... and even if he likes you, you don't think he entirely trusts you yet.


Your alibi is ironclad. Idly, you wonder what the Silent Siren is up to now. Her crimes were fairly spectacularly public before her arrest, but she seems to have been keeping a low profile since escaping from Prince Tenor's minions when they sprang her from jail. You send another text, not waiting for Jake to reply. You need Jake on the defensive and not asking questions.
You stare at your phone.

[] Your accidental double date with Lewis and Alice at the bowling alley worked great for you last time. Let's not mess with a winning formula.
[] Bowling again? Hm, it turns out that you read your calendar wrong. Tomorrow night you have to work on a brief. How does ... the opera sound? Sunday afternoon? You'd love to see what Jake looks like dressed to the nines.
[] Interpol? Wanted? ABORT MISSION! Jake's a cop. You're a defense attorney, you know how these things work! He may not want to arrest you, but someone higher up will put together the pieces quickly enough.
[] (write-in)

What did you do with the ring?

[] Left it with the jeweler to be resized. It should be safe there.
[] Let Mateo take custody of it. The poor fellow seemed very anxious.
[] Kept it close. You want to know more about it and can't really trust anyone.
[] Handed it off to Midori upstairs in your office. You can trust her, right?
[] (write-in)

"You want me to hide it for you?" Midori blinks at the ring.

"Yes," you say. "It's safer if you hold onto in than I do."

"Oh," she says, putting the ring on a magnetic clip. "But it might get damaged if I get in a fight. I'll just put it on the other side of the fridge, nobody looks there."

"Not behind the fridge!" You shake your head.

"No, the other other side," she says, reaching sideways through the front of the fridge in a way that makes your brain hurt. You briefly see a field of stars and a strange flat magnetic expanse of white as she reaches further around the fridge, a hidden seventh side of what you formerly believed to be a rectilinear object. Her fingers stretch as they deftly place the magnetic clip with Queen Victoria's engagement ring between a ripped cover of Rolling Stone featuring a young man with blue eyes and a crumpled piece of graph paper covered with cryptic scribbles. Your brain hurts for a moment as you try to make sense of that, and then the whole room goes sideways. You close your eyes and shake your head.

When you open your eyes, the fridge is back to its normal dimensions. Good luck figuring that out, Interpol, you think to yourself.


Mateo was not happy about the disappearance of the ring, or your date with Jake. You do let him note down the seat numbers on the tickets you bought to The Magic Flute (Jake seemed unsure of the whole opera thing, so you went ahead and bought tickets yourself). He'll be following you to the opera house in a separate car. In your car, actually. Apparently he doesn't own one. Weird.

Anyway, Jake looks fantastic if a little bit stiff and uncomfortable in his suit. He probably only wears one for weddings and funerals, but someone else made sure the suit fit him right when he bought it and he's stayed exactly the same dimensions since then. He brought a flower. You've dressed in the most daring thing you can imagine wearing, which is a knee-length purple affair paired with knee-high boots to conceal your prosthetic foot. Almost more daring than wearing boots to the opera is the dress's back, which dips somewhere closer to your hips than your shoulders. Jake's eyes widen appreciatively when he sees that.

On the drive to the opera, Jake fills you in on some of the things that he's been hearing about at the station. Lady Light has been deviating from her usual patrol patterns since she and the Gray Knight stopped working together, some kind of announcement in middle Egyptian has been delivered to every city hall in King County on papyrus scrolls, and Hell's Belle melted a hole in the side of a bank vault, which would have netted her several million dollars in cash if not for the fact that printed money is ... flammable. Also, the game today at CenturyLink Field has been canceled, reportedly due to the fact that Groombot threw a Crimson Guard tank through the side of the stadium during a fight.

Several puzzle pieces click together in your head. The Gray Knight kicked the Lady Light out of his base right after your first date with Jake. A date in which, right in front of Lewis Cooper, he called you Amanda Norman and said he put corpse dogs out looking for you. Amanda Norman, of course, being the name of the mysterious woman who showed up with a woodchippered foot in Snoqualmie the same night that you disappeared from the Gray Knight's base. These things are connected. Lewis Cooper and his girlfriend Alice learned enough to connect you with the public police reports, and then suddenly the Gray Knight and the Lady Light are on the outs with each other.


The opera is wonderful. The star of the show being unfortunately suddenly ill, Tamino is being played by a local understudy, who is really quite good. It's a match for the mellifluous tones of the self-proclaimed King of Seattle himself, although you've never actually heard the latter sing. A faint suspicion wiggles in your brain.

You spent half the intermission making small talk with a distinguished-looking older woman while in line for the ladies' room. She was complaining about her son's date and her daughter being rude to each other. After you got back from the restroom, you found Jake laughing and talking with none other than Lewis Cooper. Alice is hanging on Lewis's arm as if it's necessary to maintain her balance, wearing a bold red dress that lets you know that she has no tan lines on her sternum, and the next thing you know Jake is whisking you upstairs to the Coopers' box. There you find Lewis's sister (awkwardly named Alicia) drinking directly from a bottle of Grand Marnier. She puts down the bottle with a loud belch, an act deliberately calculated to annoy Alice. She clearly doesn't approve of her prospective sister-in-law, doesn't even like opera, and her mother quietly left during intermission.

The view is much better from the Coopers' box. You're not sure what's going through Lewis's mind, but Jake is really happy he's found someone he doesn't feel awkwardly out of place around, and in the comparative privacy of the box, he feels free to cuddle up to you and wrap his arm around your shoulders, so that's nice. Also, Alice has invited both of you to come back to Lewis's place for drinks and dinner.

What do?
[] This is a great opportunity to snoop on Lewis Cooper and figure out something.
[] This is a great opportunity to have a fun time with Jake, and there's absolutely no way he's going to be driving back to Snoqualmie after dinner and drinks at Lewis's place.
[] No! Jake needs to go straight back to your place with you!
[] You need to get better at Perception, damnit.
[] (write-in)

Okay, so that's a plan for tonight. And what are you going to do afterwards?
[] Someone needs to stop Hellbitch, she's causing too much damage.
[] Silent Siren hasn't made the news for a while, and you need to figure out what she's up to.
[] Time to try to expose Prince Tenor.
[] Just try to stay out of sight until Lady Light is in custody and Interpol has stopped searching for a ring thief.
[] (write-in)