under the deep blue sea (Dr Mobius)

Doctor Möbius was not really familiar with the criminal underworld. Much as he pretended to be some dastardly supervillain with tons of connections... in truth he was just a man who liked to research a lot of various topics. So it was that he was completely unaware of the various back-room channels that had been trying to contact him and his men for months. Physical notes warning of muscling in on turf had been mailed to vacant offices, calls had been made in code to people that didn't know the new start-up that they worked for in Delaware was actually a front for a criminal gang in the Caribbean, and emails and links to specific dark-web chatrooms that could only be accessed by special browser programs had been sent to the email address that Johann Möbius had set up for White Whale's non-existent CEO.

Of course, further compounding the issue was the fact that Möbius was completely unavailable for large portions of the day, as the nuclear submarine that he was on usually stayed below the surface of the water. Thus, preventing most forms of communication due to being too deep for radio waves to penetrate. However, one fine day after he'd gotten his minions back on board the sub, and before it could dive, Möbius got a whole lot of emails sent to his laptop all at once. He perked up as ping after ping came to his ears, and he grunted as he looked at all of the busy work he had to do. He started reading them over, and typed up responses to be sent during the next surfacing period about six hours later.

And then Möbius saw a message that made him pause...


Sent on 3/27/23

Rebecca Jane, my little dragon. I do have bad news for you. R died during a mission and little S only has you and me now. She is also showing powers and she can make flame weapons just like you. She may not look much like you but the Apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree.

So to protect her I will take her to a safe place. The normal arrangements for her support still apply so no change there. Keep safe Rebecca so one day you might be a family again.

L T

"Who the hell is "L.T."? A Lieutenant? Larson Tyler? Lad Thompson? Or some... wait, little dragon? Is this guy like, American Chinese and trying to sound more authentically Chinese even though he's speaking a different language? Lu Ting? Eh, whatever..."

It seemed that, even without an audience, Doctor Möbius liked to crack tasteless jokes or come up with strange insults or just plan psychoanalyze random people with reads that were either painfully accurate or so far off the mark that they said more about Doctor Möbius' worldview than whoever he was talking about. Still, despite his banter directed to nobody but himself, Möbius felt as if he had read something that he shouldn't have. He also felt that he should get Rebecca into his cabin/office ASAP.

He rose from the table in the center of the cabin that acted as a breakfast table and work desk, depending on time of day, and took the two or three steps his cabin afforded him to the door, and the little box next to it. The "box" was an internal phone, a lot like a very old-school landline, that let him call up various parts of the submarine with a quick press of a button or two. He punched in the code for the crew berthing and held the handset up to his ear.

"Doctor Möbius to crew berthing, someone find me Miss Haver and have her come to my cabin immediately. She has a message from an "LT" that was, for whatever reason, sent to my email address instead of one of hers."

He hung up the handset and took those two steps back to the table before sitting down again. Then, Möbius got back to the work that had been interrupted by the emails. He was assembling a series of tubes together with coils of wire... and for some reason, he had what appeared to be a model submarine that was all black with a very thick conning tower and a red star on the sides on his desk. One of the arrangements of tubes and wires was attached to one side already, via some sort of solder. Perhaps he had applied it with the soldering iron and the bits of solder on his desk. As he assembled the machine, he grunted and looked over at a set of diagrams that he had drawn up, as if double-checking proportions and math that he had run a dozen times already.

"Silent drive my ass, the amount of changes I had to make to get it to be quiet and maybe not drain all of the ship's power. If this test model even works..."

Lucifer

Doctor Möbius looked up from his work as soon as Raúl squeezed his way through the door to the captain's cabin, with Rebecca in tow. He dropped her off with a grunt and a very brief sentence.

"Miss Haver."

And then he was off, leaving Möbius and Rebecca alone. Well, after Raúl's shadow cleared the room and the heavy footsteps couldn't be heard through the door to Doctor Möbius' cabin...

Möbius set down the submarine model and the strange machinery attached to it and grabbed his laptop. He turned it around so that the screen faced Rebecca, showing her the open email from L.T., or "Lucy Tang". He'd had a bit of time to mull over the message while he was waiting for Rebecca to arrive, and he had a few ideas as to what was going on. "S" was obviously some sort of relative to Rebecca, genetic or adopted, who was also an Oddity. Her mutation was similar to Rebecca's, which lent credence to this character being a genetic relative. Possibly a daughter or younger sister. Neither had come up in his initial sweep, but Möbius had only been looking for official records in nations in Europe and the Western Hemisphere... Perhaps if he expanded his search for other continents. Maybe China... or places that were populated by a Chinese ethnic group, like Hong Kong or Taiwan.

Either way, he would probably get some information out of Rebecca with a good question here and there.

"So, should I be expecting some sort of income-withholding order for child support payments here? I really cannot afford any sort of government probe for tax fraud or your finances and background, right now. Those fake identities will only hold up to so much scrutiny..."

Lucifer

Doctor Möbius wondered how in the hell he had missed records from California, as he had scraped data from just about every police department server in the United States... unless the records in question hadn't been digitized, or the pseudonym that Rebecca was using while in the California Triad was suitably different from the rest of her known nicknames and codenames. It was also possible that her records in California were being kept on some disconnected server somewhere. It was also possible that he simply hadn't programmed the AI he'd used to sift data properly, and it had picked up information on the California Triad... it just hadn't given that to Möbius. Or he'd just overlooked something, that was also perfectly possible.

His train of thought was utterly derailed by Rebecca's tears. She was clearly on the brink of a breakdown, and Möbius had little idea how to help. Or get her out of his cabin so he didn't have to deal with the problem. Why did strong emotions always make him freeze up when he wasn't prepared ahead of time? He didn't know, nor did he know exactly how to deal with Rebecca's problem. Finding her daughter wouldn't solve things, since Rebecca wanted to keep "Sophie" away from the criminal life. Well, at least from building up a criminal record. The part of Möbius that wasn't overwhelmed catalogued that fact for later.

For the moment, he gave Rebecca light pat on the head and a somewhat shaky, "There, there..."

He didn't really know what else he could do.

Lucifer