Scene 18 - October 21st

Interior Hideout, Morning

Maxwell Copperfield

I yawned as I stepped out of the shower, already clad in the illusion of my true appearance, but not bothering to wear my suit. After all, I wasn’t planning on going anywhere as the Magnificent Maxwell, today. Well, I’m always magnificent, but I wasn’t going to be Magnificent. It was just another day of internet research, along with the usual daily routine.

After my successful theft of Dallas’s thesis, I had read through it to learn where Merlin’s introductory guide had been when the thesis was written in 1964. I had hoped that I would be able to take a brief jaunt to wherever it was and steal it immediately, but had run into a problem.

The book had been in storage in a London museum - the fools had no idea what they had had - but when I took a moment to check that museum’s files, I discovered that it had been transferred to a different branch of the museum for display in 1971. Then in 1976 it was put back into storage, until 1984 when it was gifted to a different museum...

It was tricky enough to track it, given how few of the museums kept their records online, that I completely understood why it had gotten Dallas his thesis. I had spent the last two months tracking the damn thing, and was still only up to 2009!

The latest problem that had risen in my tracking was that the book, along with a number of other artifacts, had wound up back in London in what was apparently the site of the original Camelot, for a cultural heritage festival or some such thing. The festival had been attacked by a magical supervillain and defended by a magical superhero and, with all the magic flying about, most of the relics had somehow managed to fall into the foundation stones of Camelot!

The hero had been very apologetic, of course, but it had been a huge blunder - particularly since she had been unable to recover the items from the stones. Apparently there had been a preexisting enchantment which had probably been laid by Merlin to use the stones as storage, and it was that enchantment which had malfunctioned from the various energies being thrown around. She said that the extradimensional space had been thoroughly locked to her, and there was no way to bring them out.

Well, maybe Murphy Fox was so easily stymied, but extra-dimensional pockets were exactly my area of expertise. I was confident that I would have no trouble extracting the book when I got my hands on the right stone.

The trouble was, no one had made note of which relic had fallen into which stone. From one book, I suddenly had to track 14 large stones, each of which was displayed in different museums across the globe. And when I figured out where they were, I would have to check each one for its contents!

Supervillainy didn’t pay enough for this, I mused as I picked up a phone to dial today’s museum, and put on a British accent. “Hello, Carnegie History Museum? This is Wynne Jones, from the British Museum. No, the one in Denver. I’m calling about an item that our museum donated to yours in 2009, a stone from the foundations of Camelot...”