Trapped
James Alan Gardner
 The novel opens with five friends out for a night of drinking and occasional brawling. All five are teachers at a less-than-first-rate boarding school called Feliss Academy, situated in the town of Simka in Feliss Province (a future version of Simcoe, Ontario, the author's home town, and not far from the author's Waterloo current home). Future versions of other real locations, such as Niagara Falls, Port Dover, and the Port Dover mausoleum appear in the novel. The five, frustrated and bored with their unsatisfactory lives, are: * Sir Pelinor, the school's fencing instructor, who fancies himself a courtly knight; * Sister Impervia, the self-defense trainer, and a Handmaid of the Holy Order of Magdalenes; * the Steel Caryatid, sorceress, psychic, and gifted in pyrokinesis; * Myoko Namida, whose specialty is telekinesis and levitation; * and Philemon Abu Dhubhai, Ph.D., the novel's narrator, a scientist and the scion of a wealthy and powerful family in the Middle East. Tonight, however, is an unusual night: the Steel Caryatid has received a premonition that the group will undertake a quest. The quest reveals itself when Dhubhai encounters a ghost, and learns that one student at the school has been murdered while another, the victim's boyfriend, has run off. The group embarks on a search for the missing boy, which soon transforms into something far more sinister: a hunt for a shape-shifting alien creature, malevolent and very dangerous. The group expands with new recruits, then is whittled down by deaths along the route, as the search comes to involve aliens, a crazy and highly lethal Spark Lord, and a criminal gang nearly as bad. Their quarry, the runaway boy, turns out to be one of the most gifted psychics the world has ever known, which adds a new layer of complexity to their dilemma. Dhubhai and his surviving companions reach a bloody crisis in the basement of the power station at Niagara Falls, one of the few places on Earth that still maintains electric power and traces of OldTech civilization. Dhubhai learns that Spark Royal has kept the power flowing in order to imprison an alien force; the sinister being they have been following is only a small offshoot of a much greater and darker whole. Dhubhai discovers more than he anticipated about the cryptic workings of the League of Peoples before the alien force is controlled.