All Gathered Together

We, our new friends and Mr Bond all take cabs to the British Museum, where a secret annex is to be our League's headquarters from now on. When we get there, I see that it is furnished with some quite remarkable artifacts and pictures, but I don't get the chance to examine them closely, as we need to hold a "council of war". I have to ensure that everyone is properly briefed on our task, and then we need to formulate a plan for carrying it out.

Griffin is present, at Mr Bond's insistence, apparently already sufficiently recovered - both physically and mentally - to join us. I am none too keen on having him as a member of our league, but am not in a position to refuse our employer. So now the league numbers five - or arguably six: myself, Mr Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Dr Jekyll and his alter ego, and Griffin - I can't bring myself to give him the normal polite honorific of "Mr", given what he has done. Griffin is dressed now, and his head and hands are swathed in bandages, since otherwise his invisibility would be rather unsettling.

Now that we are in private, our new friends have dropped their disguises. They are certainly a strange-looking bunch, but then we have some very odd characters in our league as well. I form the opinion that most of them are more trustworthy than Mr Bond, who - although he is our employer - I find myself trusting less and less as time goes by.

Before the briefing can begin, the one who I believe is called Chiana asks: "I thought that you said that there was a member of your league called Mr Edward Hyde? The rest of you are here, but not him. Are you going to start the briefing without him?"

I smile at that. It is good to know that all of our new friends aren't totally omniscient, for all that they sometimes seem to give that impression. But before I can explain, the one who apparently likes to be known just as "The Doctor" (though he originally adoped the pseudonym Dr Gilbreth) says:

1. "I think that you can assume that anything Dr Jekyll hears, Mr Hyde will be aware of." He obviously knows that they are one and the same - or rather one and very different.

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