Notes Taken by Samantha and Alastair Beadle.
Baba Yaga wakes up in her hidden chicken-leg hut and finds it is late in the day. She gets the hut to appear and start to walk along the street towards who knows where. She soon causes a large traffic jam. Soon she comes across a police car parked by the road. The officers in it tells her the superhero group is across the city tackling a band of supervillians. He agrees to lead her to the archive building by the war museum, driving ahead of the hut.
Molinya wakes up; she feels awful. She seems to be in a sewer, face down in the muck; she can see that the sewer is blocked by rubble some way behind her. Mother Bear and Akula are also not feeling to good as the adrenaline from the fight wears off, but they start to dig at the rubble, thinking Molinya is trapped under it. Molinya can't find any tracks left by the villains on her side of the rubble, so she soon starts to dig at the rubble from her side. Akula then trickles down through the rubble as water and tells her they will soon get her out. Akula then goes back to check on the bug woman, who was left frozen in a block of ice in the records room.
General Winter puts up ice scaffolding to support the building, as the explosions seems to have done it no good.
Akula finds that the bug lady has been freed, the ice around her having been shattered in some fashion. He also notices a large gap in the records boxes on the shelves close by, but leaves investigating it for later. On running to the street he just sees the bug-woman disappear around a corner down the street. Akula shouts at the hovering Napalm to follow her. Napalm flies off in the direction Akula points out but she is unable to find the insect-woman after she ducks down between the buildings, so she returns to the archive building.
Molinya is freed from the sewer and goes onto the roof of a nearby building to get some fresh air. Baba Yaga and her hut arrive and seeing Molinya joins her on the roof by having the hut jump up to the roof (some few stories). Fortunately the building seems able to take the weight of the hut.
Akula goes back into the building to investigate which records have been stolen.
Baba Yaga uses her pestle and mortar to produce a minty-flavoured potion to make Molinya, Akula and Mother Bear feel better and it seems to work very well as they are soon on the road to recovery.
Going through the archive's index, Akula discovers the missing records were from the Great Patriotic War (WWII) and concerned Nazi submarine movements from near the end of the war, around 1944-1945. They were records captured from the Nazi's in the fall of Berlin. Akula wonders if there are duplicates of the records anywhere.
The police (who have been surrounding the archive building) arrive on the scene. Many are wearing NBC suits. The prisoners from the roofs who Napalm captured/incapacitated are brought down and arrested (those who don't come down in body bags). Reports of what happened are given.
The prisoners are a mixed group - some are obviously ethnic Russian and some more swarthy and Arabic in appearance. One of the prisoners starts shouting at Napalm; no-one understands, but it doesn't sound at all flattering. She instantly recognises the language as Pushtu, which makes him an Afghan, and she fires on him, a powerful focused bolt of fire which incinerates his chest, killing him instantly. Everyone, police and criminals, goes very quiet. Molinya suggests that Napalm leaves or she will be arrested; she flies away to shout of 'Stop' from the police, but little in the way of action.
A policeman shows Molinya high tech (western-made) radio headsets that the prisoners were all wearing. They were probably getting information from the supervillains, and were certainly in communication with them. All the heroes (apart from Napalm) are given one of the headsets by the police commander, as they'll probably be more useful that way than languishing in an evidence room somewhere (and the police have lots of others anyway - there are lots of prisoners).
The police also identify two of the supervillians from the descriptions given after they call back to HQ. They are Black Dog (the man all in black with the black lightning powers), who is known to be involved with the Russian Mafia, and WarWolf (the man in the suit with the guns); he is known to have fought with the rebel Chechen government against the Russian Army.
Napalm arrives at the Afghan Veterans Foundation (located in a large anonymous concrete building in the north-west of the city, near the Central Army Sports Club). She seeks out her counsellor, Dr Cheslar Borodinsky, and talks to him about the war and that she has just done something bad. He keeps asking her what she has done, and she won't tell him ("how can I help you properly if you won't be open with me?", asks Dr Borodinsky). Eventually she leaves and goes to the nearby Veterans Bar where she spends all the cash she has getting drunk out of her head.
Molinya suggests going to a Mafia nightclub to try to get information on the Black Dog; Akula and Baba Yaga agree with this suggestion. General Winter makes his excuses and goes home (meeting his chauffeur out of sight of the rest of the party).
Mother Bear goes to the Botanical Gardens Street Police station via the Savelovskaya Metro station to get information on the woman who had reported seeing the bug creature which was mentioned in the news two days ago.
Arriving at the police station (a 30's art deco construction), she goes to see the officer who took the report, a fat slovenly Sergeant named Gavril Armanovich Sukhanko. He does not look startlingly pleased to see her, but tells her about the report of the bug-creature - it was phoned in by a Mrs Pebcunia from the Otradnoe district to the north of here, and he grudgingly admits to selling the story to the press for a sum of cash. She also asks the officer about Mafia haunts in the area.
The officer is reluctant to tell her anything about the Mafia, so she turns into her bear form and roars at him. After he tells the several police officers who burst in, guns drawn, at the roar, that everything is OK and they go, he is much more co-operative (and much paler!). He gives her a list of places - Nikolai's Nightclub/Bar, Peter the Great's Bar, Volkaslav's Bar and Stavichik's Bar - which are known (or suspected) to be Mafia haunts.
Mother Bear goes to see Mrs Pebcunia. She lives in a large anonymous 50's apartment block, now somewhat run down and graffittied. After Mother Bear is able to establish that she is who she says she is, Mrs Pebcunia, a babushka in her 50's, tells Mother Bear how she had seen the bug lady (she is sure it was female) sitting on her balcony rail when she went to close the curtains while watching TV. It seemed to be looking out at the city, but had looked at her when she had screamed, and then flown away. Then she phoned the police to report the incident, and wasn't taken too seriously. The description Mrs Pebcunia gives matches the bug woman seen at the archive building quite well. Mother Bear asks the woman to phone Captain Ostranko if she sees the bug lady again.
Molinya, Akula and Baba Yaga arrive outside the Krutok Casino in the Taganka district. Baba Yaga stays outside the club in a back alley and starts to surround the place with a mist from her pestle and mortar. The other two go in dressed as normals not superheroes, through the mist Baba Yaga is making (currently only knee deep). Molinya looks a lot like a police officer working under cover.
Inside the Casino it is crowded and smoky, with lots of loud music playing. Among the crowds Molinya and Akula pick out three groups of what are probably Mafioski, all keeping well apart at separate groups of alcoves and tables.
Molinya recognises a grass/snitch/information broker called Nikolai Petrovich and quizzes him about Black Dog while being generally intimidating and nasty to him. The man tells her that he knows nothing but will try and find out. Akula thinks that the man knows more than he is telling and when he goes off to the toilets Akula follows. In the toilets Akula overhears the man making a telephone call from a cubicle, but is unable to hear what is being said.
After a while Molinya is approached by two thugs from one of the Mafioski groups. They say that their boss, Mr Mikhail Gregoravich, wants to speak to her and escort her to a corner, where a smartly dressed man in his 40's is sitting with a beautiful young woman on one arm. With him in his alcove are a more smartly-dressed thug and a man who looks like an accountant. Other thugs are sitting at tables and in alcoves nearby.
Mikhail stands up. He tells Molinya that, "You are out of your depth here, and should leave things which do not concern you well alone. Consider this to be a friendly warning." Molinya is then punched hard in the guts by one of the thugs, who Molinya, not hurt nearly as much as the thug expected, rapidly hits back.
The other thugs around Mikhail pull guns. Akula goes to the nearby phone and calls the police to the club. Molinya leaps to the nearest alcove table and grabs one of the thugs there, using him as a human shield and controlling his gun hand with one hand to fire at the other thugs. A gun fight ensures. The thug sheltering Molinya soon dies, and she incapacitates many of the thugs with gunfire (aiming for guns hands particularly). Many people head for the exits, including the two groups of other Mafioski who form armed escorts around the bosses. But as people pass through the fog around the building they become disorientated as the fog seems, while one is in it, an infinite frightening void. Many start to scream from fear, or go into shock. Most people who are in the club stop trying to leave.
Akula turns into his watery superhuman form and uses his powers to temporarily paralyse people involved in the combat. He spots Mikhail crawling away from the gunfight under the cover of the tables, and paralyses him too.
Eventually the gun fire stops and Akula does first aid on a number of people caught in the crossfire. Molinya locates the paralysed Mikhail under a table and takes his gun away.
Back at the Veterans Bar, Napalm drinks until the barman refuses to give her any credit and then she goes out onto the street and starts to beg for cash to buy more drink.
Mother Bear goes back to the metro, and goes home.