Fangs For The Fantasy

Ok, everyone’s alive, the warehouse is rebuilt, Lena is shelving the Artefacts, Jinks is getting his stuff from the Dead Agents storage and Pete is complaining about the lack of hot water with 5 people living in the B&B (what happened to the HG Wells anyway?) – in short, it’s business as usual.

And they have a ping, an Artefact that causes spider venom poisoning without actually having people bitten by a spider. It’s an artefact that Jinks recognises from his time undercover with Sykes, part of his arsenal – but the arsenal disappeared after Sykes died

The woman who has been bitten was a cleaner and one of her jobs was to clean a house that belonged to the man who illustrated Pinocchio – and since Sykes was obsessed with the writer of the book (since the bracelet allowed him to walk) it’s a good place to start looking. Carefully.

Looking round the house, they find photographs with default pictures in them and even plastic food – pointing to the house as being for show. They do find the biting spider artefact – and lots of empty crates were the other artefacts were.

Next clue – the building had an alarm so time to go to the security company to see if someone broke in, or had the code. Turns out all their fear of conspiracy actually come down to an inept security employee giving out the code to his friend so he could steal the stuff, pawn it and split the money. To the pawn shop! That then blows up (but like the pop-culture reference to the History Channels love of pawn shows). Warned by a “vibe” from Pete they’re ok – but more investigation is now needed.

And they even let Leena out! In the field! Out of her plot box! Because Leena has the psychic ability to tell how an Artefact should be stored without it becoming dangerous, she’s the ideal person to sort through the stack and make sure another explosion doesn’t happen. But 6 Artefacts have already been sold – as well as a pipe the original thief kept.

Time for them to split up (Jinks and Claudia, Artie and Leena, Myka and Pete). A pair of invisibility sunglasses, Napolean’s violin, some anger-inducing golf clubs and a bird cage that summons murderous birds. Nicely standard snatch and grabs – almost. Artie’s touching the raging golf club leads him to rant about how he sacrificed for everyone, that he saw all he loved die and he can’t even tell anyone. Which, naturally, rather surprises Leena.

Myka and Pete have the pipe to track down - only it’s held by a thief and he’s using its ability to summon storms to rob a bank. Checking with his mother, they discover their house is being foreclosed by the bank he robbed.

Since it causes storms, they can track it using weather radars, which results in them having a armoured car almost dropped on them. But they do notice that the thief, Jesse, has a bandage which, when they put it together with the medical book in his flat, they assume means he needs medical attention – which would also explain why he says he’s “running out of time”.

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