Another few months, another body of Illuminati to introduce as a group. The Duumvirate had come alone, this time; bringing other Illuminati along with them for this sort of thing turned out to be bad politics. Sarah and Paul had special positions, but it caused dissension if they were seen as flaunting them. They didn't like doing it. Despite the implantation of the Bavarian general servants, despite the fact that the railgun was more than four years ago, and despite the precautions taken against traps, they never felt truly safe in the headquarters. Not only was it a place purpose-built to conspire in, it was a place for conspiracies to unfold, and there was no changing that.

So seeing a generic-looking Enforcer standing just around a corner was a disturbing thing. The twins stopped for a moment, looking at it. It didn't move, which meant that something was wrong; Enforcers waited but never loitered. An Enforcer without immediate orders performed self-maintenance tasks (food, drink, sleep) or waited in a specified barracks area, not in a hallway. The twins walked up to it, almost wishing for the heel-wheels the kids had, and noticed it was with seven identical others, all of them standing just around the corner, not moving, not responding, not even getting out of the way of where the twins would presumably walk to. Something was definitely wrong here.

"Enforcers, what are your current orders?" Howard asked them. They didn't answer him. By tradition they didn't have to, and couldn't be expected to, but they didn't even acknowledge his question. His brother looked around, trying to determine if the Enforcers were meant to lure them into another trap. Nothing moved.

Howard pulled out his weapon and began waving it around; William got the idea immediately and did the same. Enforcers, as a rule, had very specific orders regarding friendly fire. Shit happens in combat, particularly fast and unexpected combat, particularly combat involving panicked, violence-inexperienced Illuminati. So Enforcer orders were almost never a lethal retaliation to life-threatening provocations, at least not in a public place; killing an Enforcer was moderate property damage; getting an Illuminatus killed with Enforcers could lead to the Enforcer owner's own demise. Howard was banking on the idea that the Enforcers had them in mind as 'enemies', and so would respond immediately to a threat from them.

The moment the aperture of one weapon pointed at a member of the Enforcer group, they all reached for their weapons at once. Short-barreled anti-Enforcer hand cannons, which looked like original Barnums.

The moment they reached for their weapons, the twins ended them, carving their arms and torsos with two long narrow-beam blasts, setting their clothing alight and leaving their weapons undamaged.

The twins looked at each other, understanding the enemy's plan at once: The Enforcers would wait at one end of the hall, the twins would be facing away walking down the other, and the pellets would be there before the sound of the Enforcers drawing their weapons, killing them both instantly without any chance of survival. Simple, unavoidable, lethal, and extremely hard to prevent.

Except they had prevented it, and they collected the anti-Enforcer weapons, informing the facility's rushing Enforcers of what happened. They then left to deal with the nascent Illuminati. Although they'd have to investigate the weapons' manufacture, refusing to interrupt their schedule for something as insignificant as a failed assassination attempt was particularly good politics, and impressed the newcomers greatly.

The only real problem was how to prevent future attacks of the same sort; they found the general-servant leader, and told him to ban any Enforcers not his own from leaving their vehicles while they were here, and then told him to keep the vehicles monitored. Other Illuminati wouldn't like it, but it was better than trying to ban the weapons. Just like that, all conspiring and physical message-passing in the Bavarian headquarters would either have to be done with sentient servants or in person.


There weren't a lot of good compromises when it came to the direct intimidation factor of doing it yourself. No one had yet invented a remote-body system to reliably fake being somewhere through Enforcers or robots, but there were such things as impostor Enforcers; Sarah already had her own, after all. Howard had earlier wished for clones they could afford to replace. He found getting his wish more than a little unnerving. Because of the risk of discovery, the twins resolved only to use them when they figured they had fairly good odds of walking into a trap.

Barnum had an extremely isolated, well-fortified headquarters in the most uninhabitable part of the Australian outback he could find, another 'military base' reserved for 'experimental projects', an Oz version of Area 51 that almost nobody had heard of and nobody went to. With cannons everywhere outside and who knew what inside, it definitely fell into the potential-trap category. Raiding him would have been one thing, but walking in without destroying anything would have been inviting him to kill them instantly.

Barnum was startled by their presence, unnerved by their formal, identical mannerisms, and when they told him they had guns they wanted him to investigate, he tripped over himself putting them into the machine he'd built for the purpose, getting more and more nervous as it reported null results. Apparently the internal parts of the weapons had been melted down and reformed, weakening them but annihilating his nanoscale identification.

"And why is that, Barnum?" one of the twins asked from behind him, after a brief pause. Sweat appeared on Barnum's brow. They weren't acting quite like themselves, and if they were trying to scare the shit out of him with that, it was working. Sure, he could kill them with any one of the dozen weapons embedded in the walls, but it would be the last thing he ever did and he knew it. He found himself wishing he had one of the rogues' clones.

"I don't know, I- I don't even know if I made these-", he sputtered out.

He looked back at the twins, and in desperation and fear, his mind played tricks on him- he found himself unfocusing his eyes like a Magic Eye trick, seeing a full image of one Dominator in the middle and two half-images to the sides. Even the way they stood was perfectly identical.

"You did make them," the twin Barnum saw with his left eye said, and the moving/not moving mouth of the figure Barnum saw in the center looked like it was speaking his doom.

"Don't kill me until I finish, okay?" Barnum realized that he shouldn't have phrased the request quite like that- they might kill him right after he finished, just because that's what he asked for. "I didn't tell them anything. They found out, like I said they might." What he didn't say was how they found out. They didn't find out by careful inspection of the weapons; they found out by asking him and reading his emotions when he lied. He was so bad at this he couldn't even hide those properly. "But I did put in something to stop them just in case someone used them on me. I have a device that can short-circuit the electronic triggers remotely. You have them so it's really easy to prove." The twins would wait until after the conversation was over to test it, and if Barnum had been lying, he would have been dead quicker than he could say 'dead'.

"You saved this just in case we came knocking. We could have died and unless someone else found out, nobody would ever have known it was you," the right twin said. Barnum nearly shit himself. That was the real reason he put the trigger override in. He figured that if someone was going to kill him they'd use something a lot bigger than his own weapons or just assassinate him with Enforcers in a public place, much like they had tried with the twins.

"Yes! Yes, I did, I thought of all this from the first, and I hope giving you this is enough to spare my life!" His explanation was plaintive, his own whining grating his ears. "I'm not playing games like some people are! I'm just trying not to get killed! And so is pretty much everyone I know!"

"They threatened you anonymously," the left twin said. He didn't have to have confirmation of that fact to know it. "You could have told us the same way."

"I thought about it. I almost did. But.. I figured that if they saw you using the device, then they'd kill me for sure.." It was then that Barnum realized how untenable his position really was. By having an infirm foot on both sides of the fence, he'd left himself open to falling in the middle and crushing his balls- a thing the twins might actually do. Being an arms dealer didn't seem to work as well in the Illuminati as it did in the normal world. Not when he could be killed by either side for selling to that side's enemies. He really was a failure as an Illuminatus, but since he was born into it there was no way out for him.

"You're suffering from a grievous failure of imagination," the right twin said. "You could have explained everything and we'd give you far more security once we started operations. They never detected the vulnerability, so you could have sold them all kinds of weapons, all vulnerable at the push of a button. If you had given them reason to rely on you, it would have been even better."

"But I can't! I'm not a confidence man like my father, all right?!"

"Then you could have contacted us and we would have found you someone who is," the left twin said, exasperated. The fact that they smiled at him for half a second before they said anything was really starting to get to him. "Your imagination just keeps failing. We are recording this, you know, and once it's no longer a secret we'll publish this for everyone to see. Also if something happens to either of us, it'll get published anyway, even if all we have left to publish to is enemies." That left Barnum absolutely no wiggle room. The twins had signed the enemy's death warrant on him, and they were the only ones who could prevent it from being carried out.

"Can you imagine the best consequence of that, or will your imagination fail you again?" the right twin asked with a slight smile. Barnum shook his head. He was in no emotional state to attempt to imagine anything. "Now that you've irrevocably thrown in with us, you're next for the retrovirus."