• “Finally...” the taskmaster thought, “I have finally captured the great and terrible Aphrodite!” Then he threw down his steel gauntlet, and snorted in contempt. The taskmaster left the room and locked the prisoner into the vault. He then pressurized it. Then he sealed the pressure lock and waltzed away, knowing- or at least thinking he knew- that the prisoner was not capable of escaping.
    Walking down the hallway of the underground prison, Taskmaster Vancleef noticed a young lad running towards him from behind. “I can see your shadow, young man” he said into the air. The shadow stopped running and the boy caught up with Vancleef. He gave Vancleef a message.
    To Taskmaster Vancleef,
    You have stolen my daughter. What you want, I do not know, but what you will get, that is certain. If my daughter does not come back, still breathing, within the week, I will send my best forces to take her by force, and if that does not work, I will make sure my mercenary rips that lead ball of yours off your shoulders, and if you succeed in stopping that, then you may keep my daughter. If you send her, and she is dead, I will have your head. Make sure she is still breathing, or you will regret your actions.
    A man wishing vengeance,
    Joshua Cleerense, taskmaster of the San Francisco Police dept.
    “Well, that doesn’t sound too good, sonny!” Vancleef said. “Why did her parent have to be the owner of the Police? At least we are here in the Alps, but how did he find us?”
    “He hasn’t, sir,” the lad said, “I found it in our public mail box, which just so happens to be in Rome, rather than here in the Alps. I brought it to you, sir, because it was addressed to you, although I have also shown it to the person of authority here. “
    “And who, other than me, would that be, young boy?” Vancleef prodded.
    “We have managed to find a piece of Adolf Hitler, sir. I am, although you may not believe this, Head Fuhrer of the Germans and the holy roman army.” Hitler said, making a maniacal grin.
    “That doesn’t mean you have the right to just come along and take over this place!” Vancleef said, subtly grabbing his beam-gun.
    “Actually, no. I showed it to the scientist who cloned-” Hitler stated, before being cut off by Vancleef pointing the gun at him. “Security to section 5-2-2-3-1-7 Alpha Omega Zulu Beta! We Have a Situation down here!” Vancleef said into his comm., and then Hitler Disarmed Vancleef and damaged the communications device, disabling it. The two then started a fist fight, and Hitler, despite his smaller stature, took the beam gun and pressed the trigger- and nothing. “Huh, must be the cold and the altitude” Vancleef bluntly stated. Then Hitler pulled Vancleef’s knife and slashed- and it went right through, doing nothing. He slashed twice more, and then put the knife through his own hand. “You...You!” Hitler exclaimed as it went through and he felt nothing, “You- hologram!”
    “Aye, do you think I am stupid, to go outside my quarter-” when he was cut off by Hitler deactivating the program. Hitler then smashed a nearby sleeping guard and took the beam-gun and melted the guard. He then ran towards the engineering room.
    Hitler arrived, but what put a torque in his mind was the fact that he met no guards along the way. He entered, and found about 5 guards. He dodged their laser fire, and hit the other 5 behind him, killing them. Then the chief engineer activated the heat-ray and directed it at Hitler. Hitler pulled out his vanity mirror (he did not know why he had one) and reflected it back at the cannon, melting it shut, which caused it to explode, opening the door to just the right place he wanted to be at: the Nuclear missile launch pad. He took all the comm. devices and smashed them. He took a plasma rifle and burned the bodies, which were already dead. He then went to the launch pad, and was face-to-face with a guy who really didn’t like Germans, and he especially hated Hitler, no matter what form he was in.
    “Auf Ihren Knien erhalten Sie, löschen Sie die Waffe, setzen Sie Ihre Hände hinter Ihrem Kopf!” the man said, and then Hitler gave him this look along the lines of “huh?” and then the man repeated, only in a different language, “Get on your knees, drop the weapon, put your hands behind your head!” Hitler said, “No. I think you are an idiot for saying that to a person who can out-gun and out-run you,” and he cocked his weapon. The angry wrench-wielder said, “I’ll give you ten seconds. Ten, nine, eight, two, one!” and then he fired, and Hitler, thinking he was firing the beam-gun, fired the plasma rifle. The relatively smallish fireball overwhelmed the beam of light, and the engineer burst into flames. His gun exploded, and he fell into the energy generator, incinerating himself and killing the power at the same time. Hitler didn’t think anything of this. He attempted to start the launch sequence. Nothing worked. Presently, there were guards coming. He melted the doors shut. He started pulling wires, to get the thing working again.
    He got the power started again, and then he started the launch sequence. Then, as if on cue, the door flew off its hinges and slammed into the missile, knocking the explosive part off its launchers and disabling the engines! Hitler turned around, and saw the Nameless Shogun. “You have a lot of gall, doing that around here, old man!” Hitler said. “I can’t believe you would kill your-” and the nameless shogun shut Hitler’s mouth by zapping him with a tazer. “Take him away” he said.



    Not a day later, The Nameless Shogun received his pay—one hundred thousand Euros. Then, as if waiting for his turn to hire him, Joshua Cleerense gave him a phone call. “What’s up, old friend? How are ya?” Shogun said.
    “Yeah, yeah. Listen, my daughter has been kidnapped, and I need you to go get her for me.” Joshua said.
    “Is it a dangerous mission?” Shogun replied.
    “Aye, but even by your standards, it’s tough as well as dangerous.” Shogun’s new employer said.
    “Count me in. If you had said it was not dangerous, you could have easily fired me and it would have made no difference.” Shogun bluntly said.
    “Oh come on! You haven’t even heard my fee yet!” Joshua told him.
    “It’s alright. I just got paid a hefty wage in 3 hours that I normally couldn’t make in one year!”
    “That explains that...” thought Joshua. “With who?!” he requested.
    “Are you sure?” Shogun retorted.
    “Since you put it that way, let me guess: your previous employer had kidnapped a girl, he did not tell you who she was, nor where she was, and you were guarding her, knowing nothing about her, right?” He suggested. Shogun, never wanting to get caught in a lie, said, “Part true, part false. He kidnapped an anonymous girl, and she was in a pressurized vault, inside a vault full of water, inside another pressurized vault, inside another vault full of water. Until he told me where exactly she was, I thought she could escape if she were patient enough, but then I realized that she would drown even if she managed to get out, and if that didn’t stop her, the guards would. I was never told who it was or why I was doing it, but I was out of money at the time, so I didn’t have much of a choice.” Shogun reported.
    “Ah, I see,” Joshua replied, “Almost impossible to get my daughter out, like that. Why did you get such a high wage, do ya know?”
    Shogun replied, “Aye. I was not only guarding a prison, but an entire research center. It looked like they were going to combine all the prisoners, or at least most of them, for different purposes. I suspect most of the prettier ones will make dancers, most of the brutes will make killing machines, the smart ones new scientists-“
    “So, what you are saying is, that they will take blood samples from everyone that they have, and use them to make the perfect people!?” Joshua interrupted.
    “Seemingly perfect, Joshua, Seemingly, not truly, perfect. They are attempting to control nature, I think.”
    “Well, I definitely don’t want anything bad to happen-“
    Shogun cut him off. “...they also take large amounts of blood and such. I haven’t seen a person yet that came out of there in good shape, if alive at all.”
    Joshua was obviously typing something up. “I will call you back.” He said.
    Shogun hopped into The Manta-Ray, an F-117 shaped space-/aero-craft, and went over to San Francisco.
    “You’re early.” Joshua said. “I wasn’t expecting you until another 2 hour- oh, wait, you didn’t take the commercial jet.”
    “How can you tell?” Shogun joked, turning his ship’s alarm on and cloaking it, using the Walton mirage device.
    Joshua grinned. “I am willing to pay you no less than $1,000,000 if you get her back. If she is dead, I will pay you half that and no bonus.”
    “Well, it looks like I’m going to get rich off of a hundredth of your income-per-second, taskmaster!” Joshua laughed.
    Shogun left, but almost immediately got called back. “Whats the problem now?” he asked, smelling alcohole on Josh’s breath. “Err, are you drunk?”
    Joshua said, slurring his words, “What? Offf courshe I’m not drrunk! Who do you think I am, ann idiot orr sh-shomething? Hic!”
    “Taskmaster, I think it is time you go to-” the taskmaster fell down, dropping his beer bottle. “Oh never mind, you’re already in bed.”


    Back at the Alps, Aphrodite was wondering “how did I get in this mess?” when suddenly, the answer hit her in the face, as if it was obvious and she didn’t know it: she made no mistakes and got kidnapped, for what seemed the eighty-thousandth time. Then, as if on cue, a servant went in, bringing food. “Eat.” He commanded. “you need to save your-” and then Aphrodite snapped the servants neck. Too late, the doors were closing. She went back inside. Then she pulled the servant back in, stripped it, and left the body outside that vault. She put the servant’s uniform on and started eating. “Next time they come in,” she thought, “they are going to be in for a big surprise. Heheheh, I would do Shogun proud, thinking all shadowy like this!”


    Shogun had returned to the Alps. This time, he had the big advantage of knowing where the base was.
    “They have changed a bit,” he said to himself, “the base was not this color or this size four solar days ago.”
    Indeed, it wasn’t. The base was originally cyan-blue; this time it was urine-yellow.
    Presently, Shogun spotted a storm in the distance. He activated the weather controller so that it could warm up. He went and looked for what normally would look like the prison: they could have moved it, so he had to be careful. He spotted a house, far away from the base, and made of lead. Wait a minute- “why would that prison be made of lead bricks? And why so far away from the camp, when it would make it easier to capture and subdue prisoners within the base if the prison were near the base?” Shogun landed here, but then noticed a tornado forming right over where he landed. He deployed the weather controller. It worked, diverting the tornado back at the base command.


    Another servant, intent on moving Aphrodite, entered the vault. “Where is she?!” the servant asked. Aphrodite rose. “She attempted to snap my neck, but I kicked her back. She kicked me to the back of the vault and slammed the door shut on me, and ran out. If you hurry, you might catch her, and if you’re lucky, even if she does escape, she will end up in the yellow base, where our security is best!” the male servant ran away, not questioning the suggestion. Then Aphrodite put on her normal cloths and went to where she was supposed to be—behind common bars, rather than vaults in water.


    Shogun was about half way inside when he heard a bullet coming towards him. He dodged, and fired a laser where the bullet came from. He put up his gun, and found what looked like a prison door. He looked by the handle, and there was a big red button, saying “do not use to release the prisoners”. He sliced the door’s hinges off and went inside. There were about 50 cells, 49 of which were full of insane people. Suddenly, he heard what sounded like the doors opening. He turned around, and saw the head Jailer releasing them. The prisoners completely dog piled Shogun.
    What the Jailer did not realize was that he also allowed Aphrodite to get out of her cell. Presently, she took some of the insane men’s weapons (each of them had an entire armory of makeshift weapons), namely a glass shard melted into a toothbrush (making a sorta dagger) and a lock put into a sock (making it a flail), and she hit one of the jailers, killing him. Then another one disarmed her, but she used his weapon to put a hole in his stomach, killing him. Then the head jailer kicked the beam gun out of her hand and said “don’t move” and he pointed the gun at her head. Presently, Shogun made a fireball and it incinerated the dog-pile that was all over him. “Aphrodite, no!” he yelled, shooting at the Head jailer as he attempted to use her as a human shield. The blast missed her ear, ricocheted on a button labeled “kill switch”, and then the beam blew the Head Jailer’s head off. There was a siren, as if there was a nuke about to go off. “We gotta get out of here!” Shogun said. “Yeah, no duh.” Aphrodite replied. They went into the main room, and there was a timer, saying that they had nine minutes left. “Let’s go let’s go let’s go!!” shouted a group coming their way. Shogun fired a fireball and melted that door shut. They got to their ship, and saw there was a tornado wreaking havoc all over the place. Shogun herded Aphrodite into the Manta-Ray.
    As they launched, the ground started collapsing underneath them. “Give us more power, Aphrodite!” Shogun shouted. Then the ground dropped, and it was instantly obvious why: there was a vein of lava that had been opened up by one of the explosions triggered by the kill switch. Shogun’s ship hovered where it was. “Punch it!” Aphrodite said. They went into the tornado, and went out faster than before. Presently, the Atomic Bomb went off, shaking them up, but what was truly extraordinary was that the blast started a nearby volcano to erupt. They barely made it out alive, but the volcano completely destroyed the bases around it: Red base, Yellow base, Cyan Base, Green base, Blue base, orange base and white base were all destroyed, causing more atomic explosions to occur at the same time.
    Then they went back to San Francisco and Aphrodite was reunited with her father once more. “For doing your Job, you get a million dollars. For returning Aphrodite completely unharmed, you are awarded $500,000. For prematurely erupting a Volcano before it could hurt anyone benign, $250,000. For succeeding under terrible conditions, $300,000” and then Aphrodite, watching without either Shogun or Joshua knowing, applauded.
    “Well, I suppose I could use a couple of upgrades. My ship needs to be cleansed of its radiation-” he pointed at the now glowing Manta-Ray, “-and once that is done, I need better radar and stronger armor, and a place to drop bombs from.”
    “Consider it done.” Joshua said.
    “Oh, and if you would, could you spend half your income on keeping her safe? The kidnappers this time were a little surly and bloodthirsty, and they definitely seemed to hate my guts for betraying the bad guys.”
    The three of them had a laugh at that, had a toast to his success and drank down the sparkling cider. For once, San Francisco was finally out of trouble, if only for a few days.