Chapter One

 

I first met Wolfgang Sucker two nights before the great Fuzzy-Wuzzy war.

Now, as Poker Boy, I meet my share of strange beings, mostly just people sitting around poker tables as I try to earn enough to get to the next place where I have to do my superhero thing and rescue someone or fight the bad guy. (And sometimes along the way I even save a dog or two, but that’s not part of my job description. It just sort of happens.)

But Wolfgang Sucker was one of the stranger people who ever walked up to me and asked for help.

Honestly, I didn’t see him until he was standing in front of me. I was standing against one of the large stone columns in the main lobby of the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino on the Strip in Las Vegas. My girlfriend and sidekick, Patty Ledgerwood, aka Front Desk Girl, had a couple of things to finish before she got off work and we headed back to her place.

I have no idea how Wolfgang Sucker knew who I was, and I sure didn’t notice him until he was standing in front of me.

“Poker Boy?” he asked, his voice sounding like someone sanding a piece of furniture. “I need your help if you don’t mind. My name is Wolfgang Sucker.”

Actually, what he really needed was a couple bottles of Scope and a bath. His breath smelled like he had bathed in onions, but I didn’t say anything. Not my place to judge people who are asking for my help.

That was the exact moment, as the crowds of people moved around and past us in the huge lobby, talking and laughing, that I actually focused on Wolfgang Sucker for the first time.

And actually saw him, in all of his blueness.

Not kidding. He was blue, skin and all, and there was a lot of skin showing. He only wore a pair of tight pants that seemed more like skin than pants, showing parts that no man should show in public without getting arrested.

If the blue had been painted on I would have thought him to be a refugee from the Blue Man Group that performed all the time in Vegas. But his skin was a real blue.

He had on no shirt at all, but security in the MGM Grand didn’t seem to even notice. In fact no one seemed to notice.

He stood about six inches taller than my six-foot frame and weighed far under my weight, which gave Wolfgang the look of a tall stick with arms. I had seen skinnier people, but not many. Skinnier people were usually high school basketball players, and Wolfgang looked to be a ways from high school age, even though his skin was as blue and smooth as it comes.

Besides being blue, what made Wolfgang really stand out was his nervous tick of constantly turning his head from side to side, not fast, but slowly, like a lighthouse beacon moving around.

He seldom looked at anyone directly with his deep blue eyes. His gaze just sort of passed over you until his head was completely sideways to you, then it slowly came back the other direction.

After about two minutes of talking with him that first time, I wanted to just grab his head and hold it still, but I was afraid his body would start rotating under it. And I didn’t want to get that close to that breath, either.

But worse yet, if that and the bad breath wasn’t bad enough, his head was completely bald and covered in white tattoo patterns of some weird alien design that looked at first a little like a giant net with a squid in the middle. But every time he turned his head and then started back, the tattoos seemed to shift without really shifting so that by the time his head was turned one hundred and eighty degrees in the other direction, the scars gave a different image.

And they moved around, all over his face, his head, down his neck.

Never once did the image repeat that I could tell.

I have no idea how the tattoos changed, but I sure watched them a lot trying to figure it out since there was no point trying to look the guy in the eyes. At one point I actually thought about fighting my way upstream into the onions to get closer to see how those marks were shifting like that. But I didn’t.

After a moment or two of staring at Wolfgang Sucker’s head, I realized he had been talking about something, but his rasping voice was so low I couldn’t hear it over the loud sounds of the huge lobby and the casino down the hallway.

I held up my hand for him to stop. “We’re going to need to get to a place where we can talk in a little more quiet. I’m having trouble hearing you. Can you hold on for less than one minute?”

I could see Patty heading toward us across the lobby, and I most certainly wanted her to hear what kind of help this guy needed from me. And I wanted her to meet him, otherwise she would just never believe me.

As she approached, Wolfgang Sucker turned and bowed just slightly at the waist. “Front Desk Girl. Good, I was also hoping you might help as well.”

Patty’s eyes got round and she glanced at me before going back to staring at Wolfgang Sucker as he introduced himself.

I just shrugged and indicated I didn’t know what the guy wanted.

It was a nice, comfortable October night outside, so I figured there would be less noise out through the front doors than in the lobby, so I indicated we should all move that way.

He wouldn’t budge. “No,” he said firmly. “The Fuzzy-Wuzzys are going to be arriving out there, near the front door.”

Now Patty’s eyes really got large, and I’m sure I had the worst puzzled look on my face. It was then that it occurred to me that this might be some practical joke, played on us by one of the gambling gods.

In fact, the more I thought about, the more I was sure it was a joke. The only “Fuzzy-Wuzzy” I knew came from an old children’s rhyme about a bald bear or something like that.

I slipped Patty and I out of time, leaving old Wolfgang frozen with the rest of the lobby.

I always got a kick out of doing that. It was a real power, compared to some of my other powers like getting someone to believe me or reading their faces to see if they were telling the truth. Slipping into a moment in time was just fun and cool. I couldn’t hold it very long, not more than a few minutes, but each time I did it, I got stronger. And since all my power came from casinos, it was pretty easy to do while standing inside one of the bigger ones on the planet.

“Is this guy for real?” Patty asked, staring at the scars on his head that were now frozen in the moment into a picture of some sort of alien cow being eaten by some other creature with fangs.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I’m guessing it’s a joke someone’s pulling on us. It finally dawned on me that with a name like Wolfgang Sucker, we might be the real suckers. And it was the Fuzzy-Wuzzy part that convinced me.”

Patty nodded, so I shouted into the air, “Stan!”

An instant later Stan appeared beside us. It only took him a second to notice Wolfgang and start staring, his mouth open.

“So what’s the joke?” I asked.

Stan didn’t answer, just sort of walked around Wolfgang, then came back to me.

“No joke,” Stan said. “This guy is a Searchlight. I’ve only seen one and that was a number of centuries back.”

“Searchlight?” Patty asked.

“Yeah, the name we call them, more than likely because of that annoying head movement they do. There are only a few thousand of them and they live forever, or so the myths say. No one knows where they came from, where they live, or what they even do. Or what those changing pictures on their heads mean.”

“You’re serious?” I asked, still thinking this was an elaborate joke that Stan was part of.

“Completely,” Stan said, still staring at Wolfgang. “Did he say what he wanted?”

“My help is all I managed to hear because he talks so softly.”

Stan frowned. “Not good, really not good.”

“And he wanted me to help as well,” Patty said. “And he knew who I was.”

Okay, maybe this wasn’t a joke. I sure didn’t like the sound of the God of Poker saying “Not good, really not good.” In all the years I had worked as a superhero for him, he had never said anything like that. Even joking.

“He wouldn’t go outside to talk because he said the Fuzzy-Wuzzys were going to be out there, or something like that.”

“Oh, shit,” Stan said, his normally calm face now almost pale.

Having the God of Poker looked scared about a guy named after a hairless bear didn’t make me feel any better about this situation either. I had no idea what the problem even was and I was starting to panic.

Stan turned to Patty. “Get our guest to a meeting room. I’ll be back with Laverne and some other help as soon as I can. And you had better call in your team.”

At that Stan vanished.

“Seems our nice evening at your place has just been postponed,” I said.

All Patty could do was nod as I stuck us back into real time and let the noise of the crowd wash back over us like a pounding wave. Being in the silence of between-time was always nice.

Patty indicated that Wolfgang Sucker should follow her. “I have a meeting room we can talk in.”

“Have you contacted Laverne and the others?” Wolfgang asked in his raspy voice, barely loud enough for me to hear.

“We have,” I said. “They’ll join us in the meeting room.”

He said simply, “Good. We will need everyone if we are to survive this coming battle.”

I stared at him as we walked, not liking the sound of that either. And if he wanted to contact Laverne, why didn’t he just go to her?

And then he said, just loud enough for me to hear, “And we are called Searchlights because we stand guard over humanity, always watching for trouble, not because of our head movement.”

I walked a few steps with my mouth open. Even with Patty and I out of time, he had overheard what we had said.

That was creepy, just creepy.