:Connor:

            After my visit to Caine Temple, I was feeling less ecstatic about our chances at finding Arabella and saving the city all at once. It seemed that even if we succeeded, we had a deranged reporter bent on finding out our identities.

            The fact that he was able to figure out that Arabella was a super was not a good sign. Arabella was connected to each of the supers in the League of Legends outside of our hero work. He could use her to find out who the rest of us were.

            Also learning the fact that she was recently kidnapped by a super being controlled by a super villain under the employment of a criminal mastermind wouldn't help our case either.

            (Not complicated at all)

            Oh yeah, and now the mayor has set the city against all supers.

            Great day to be alive and a super, right?

            (Note the sarcasm to that sentence)

            (This was worse than when Archer set off a paint balloon inside my Beast costume during musical practice one day.)

            We also can't forget the fact that the League of Legends hasn't been talking since Arabella went missing. Everyone blamed someone for fighting and everyone was holding newfound grudges against one another.

            Archer refused to speak to either me or Chase, Ricky was too scared to give me a call, and Cassie had decided that she was better off doing missions for MASKED than spend another moment in a super group that was splitting at the seams.

            And I couldn't ever leave out the best part, the citizens of Empire City were answering to the mayor's call for action against the supers.

            The other day I had gone out and tried to save a girl from being robbed in an alleyway and after giving her back her purse that I heroically saved, she pepper sprayed me in the eyes. I mean, I just saved your million dollar purse and you return the favor by spraying my eyes with liquid fire.

            Sometimes being a super wasn't all it was glorified to be.

            I'd even heard in the news that some street kids had tried to attack Chase while he was on his nightly patrol. Of course Chase got away, but not before the kids landed a couple poorly aimed swings.

            I had no idea where the mayor's sudden 'hate on the supers' campaign came from, but I wasn't happy about it. I knew from Arabella that his wife died during the Great Battle – a civilian casualty, but I didn't think that event could be the only source of his newfound enthusiasm to incriminate all supers for the mentally induced crimes of only two supers, even if they did kidnapped his daughter for a psychopath.

            Maybe all these things were the reason that I was so surprised to find Lacey Waters knocking on my door at dawn the morning after the mayor's announcement.

            "Lacey, how in the world did you know where I lived?"

            She kept her business demeanor and responded, "I'm a reporter, how do you think?" before pushing past me and barging into my dorm room.

            "Great to see you too."

            My roommate was a socialite. In other words, he was never around enough to notice my strange schedule and extracurricular activities. He also happened to be gone today, so Lacey and I could openly discuss my other life.

            Lacey wasted no time in settling herself on my bed and taking out various folders from her shoulder bag. One suspiciously looked like it had a MASKED insignia on the front.

    I stood awkwardly in the corner while I waited for Lacey to announce her intentions to me.

            "I think I know who Nemesis is, and you aren't going to like it half as much as me."

            Now that caught my attention.

            "Really?" I exclaimed. "This is wonderful. Now we can find Arabella and get her back to the mayor before he orders our death warrants."

            "That's going to be a little harder than you thought if my predictions are right."

            I was confused, wouldn't it be easier to find Arabella and make the mayor forgive the supers of we found out who Nemesis was and report it to him?

            She patted the spot on my bed next to her and I sat.

            "Alright," she started, "we know that the first time Nemesis started to appear was when he hired that private company to make the super soldier serum, right?"

            I nodded.

            "Then we know that he must've had some sort of connection to that company and the money to be able to hire them, so I started there. Out of the entire city, only about a hundred people had the money and connections to hire that private company. Including those who didn't seem to have money unless you looked at their offshore accounts.

            "We also know that the next time he shows himself was when he broke Smi- my father out of prison." Lacey seemed a little rattled about talking about her father as a super villain, but she recovered quickly enough. "Then he told him to kill off all of the scientists who worked at the private company because Arabella's mother had hidden the serum.

            "But after staring at these files for a while, I thought of something. What if Nemesis had a loved one who was one of the scientists that died? He was obviously mental, so he probably forgot to warn my father not to kill them. That narrowed down my list to only half of the original."

            I had to say, I was impressed that Lacey was able to figure out as much. I suspected that her journalist skills and hacking abilities were what got her this information.

            (Though I was interested to know how she was able to get secure files from MASKED without raising any red flags.)

            As she told me this information I was shown articles and statistics from a color coded binder she'd been flipping through.

            "From there I looked at connections to the second company he hired to look for a serum. That was when he lost his temper and made Venom who she was today. It was also the same place that created Crabbe and Goyle. The time frame plus the money and connections needed for that narrowed down the list to twenty two possible suspects.

            "After that, the next time we hear from Nemesis is when he sabotages the Carlton's private plane and causes it to crash in the North China Sea. Only ten people on my list had the means to sabotage the plane unnoticed in the 24 hours before it took off.

            "We wait two years and he shows up again. This time he's somehow found out about Archer's super powers and wants to hire him to help him with dirty work. Only someone close to our family could've known that Archer was a super. Not even his own family figured it out."

            I thought about that. Lacey had been more of a socialite at the time, so it was obvious why she'd never figured it out, she was never around to notice. Archer's father was the mayor at the time, so he was obviously too busy to be around. And, let us be honest, their mother was as dull as plastic ware.

            It was no wonder Archer got away with being a super for so long without anyone noticing.

            Lacey continued, this time a conspiratorial look on her face. "But why did he only start looking after so much time had passed? Why wait two and a half years after he crashed the Carlton's plane to steal the serum from their laboratories?"

            My eyes lit up as the realization came to me. It was obvious.

            "He didn't want to steal it back just yet. He didn't just kill Chase's father for keeping the serum from him, he also killed him because he backed out of a deal."

            Lacey flipped through a couple pages in her binder. "Yes, he needed money and connections that Carlton Industries had. Carlton backs out, he kills him. The only person that knew the location of the serum besides Nemesis himself and Chase's father was Chase himself. And, of course, you, but you didn't know what it was and Nemesis hadn't known that you knew."

            She seemed to find what she was looking for and stopped at a newspaper clipping from a week before Archer first robbed a bank at Nemesis's orders.

            The article was about a shootout at a secure facility in Japan. It was discovered after the shootout that the company had been lending money to questionable people and was testing on supers.

            The weird thing that the article mentioned was that most of the casualties had been shot by arrows with a dark blue tip.

            I connected the dots. Chase was somewhere in the North China Sea, which was pretty close to Japan's shores. He must've got off of the island at some point and discovered about the company's wrongdoings. But why would that worry Nemesis?

            "There were two people on our list who were receiving loans from this facility. But only one was directly invested in their experiments on supers. I think that those experiments lead to the creation of the serum he used against you, the one that took your powers."

            We were finally down to one. Someone who started his master plan because Chase could come back to Empire City at any minute and hide the PF-08 serum from him and ruin his plan. Someone who wasn't afraid of killing off billionaires and mayors.

            "Connor," she sighed and flipped to the last page of her binder, a picture of a very familiar man, "Nemesis is Arabella's father."

            You had to be kidding me.

            I thought about the day that he'd walked into Arabella's room right as I came out of the shower. Of course he'd assumed the worst, as any father would, but if he was Nemesis, no wonder he'd been so mad.

            I mean, what if your daughter was doing the do with your arch nemesis?

            His accusations from when we saved him in City Hall the other day made sense as well. He was never actually going to get kidnapped, but he needed a way to scare Arabella into joining him.

            Lacey went on to explain other documents and things that proved her theory, but I was already convinced.

            But if he was Nemesis, we had a whole other problem on our hands.

            "Even if we get Arabella back, Mr. Jones will never take back his accusations towards the supers. If he is Nemesis, he wants the whole city to hate us. It fits into his plan somehow. But if I know crazy super villains like I think I do, he wants to make this world scale, not just citywide. He's not in a strong enough position to turn the world against supers on his own, so he must have something else in mind."

            Lacey seemed to get the idea. "Of course, but what?" Lacey's phone got an alert and she stiffened suddenly.

            "What is it?" I asked.

            "It's my news report app. It only alerts me if something major happens, like the time Chase was found."

            She took out her phone and read aloud the news article. "The Supers miraculously return. All over the globe, the supers that had been previously believed to have retired or been defeated are returning back to the limelight. They all seem to be unharmed and are cleaning up their cities in record time. But wherever they were, we should all be glad that their back to saving the day again."

            My eyes widened. "Nemesis released the kidnapped supers."

            "This has to be a part of his final plan." Lacey concluded. "But if all the supers are being controlled by The Manipulator like when they kidnapped Arabella . . .

            " . . . Then the whole world is in for a huge catastrophe." I finished for her.