Superhero Adventures, UK Style

When the Balance first formed, they used commercially available earpieces designed by Dalton International for their team communications.

The Earpieces were a generic model of communicator designed for superheroes. The earpieces were activated by voice and had dedicated comms channels and a voice-dial phone.

The first Channel was encrypted and was initially set to Dalton’s Defenders dedicated channel but was subsequently changed to a different frequency and used to monitor local police communications.

Channel 2 and 3 were encrypted. Channel 2 was set as a dedicated shared communications channel for the Balance and their support team.

Channel 3 was designed to override any others and was dedicated to “Trouble Alert”, a separate and anonymous service run by a mysterious individual known as Dispatch, an apparent female who analysed the information and reports from Metawatch, ECHO, HeroNet and even Police and media reports and then contacted registered supers with real-time information about super villains, crimes in progress or attacks in their locality.

To sign up for Trouble Alert, supers had to  register with/”befriend” Dispatch through ECHO, quoting either their HCP Idex or be referred by another existing Trouble Alert user. Banshee and Chrono’s doppelgängers were already registered. Trouble Alert members can use the ECHO network to contact other superheroes in real-time anonymously, either using Chat or secure VOIP (designed and maintained securely by UserNet).

Channel 4 was set to provide  Internet Over Voice Protocol (IOVP) and was linked to an intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator similar to Apple’s Siri. It could be linked with a Heads-up Display or visual display of some sort, by bluetooth.

Channel 5 acted as a standard phone and the user could allocate any existing mobile number to it.

Channel 6 was directly linked to ECHO (European Coordinated Heroes Organisation) a specialist closed network that ensured the transmission of information related to paranormal threats anywhere in Europe, using local informants to relay messages to heroes around the continent in times of need. Monitored by the European Union and NATO, the initiative also included joint training sessions and exercises as well as regular information meetings.

ECHO offered free access and accounts to “verified” heroes, so they can keep in touch with the public and receive crowd-sourced tips and information. This system is in its infancy, but like many other Internet projects its potential benefits are tremendous.

Channel 7 is currently unallocated.

Some time later, the team meet with Ambassador Archduke Ty’dea Viisarikaa at Earth’s Ziru Sirkan Embassy. He supplied them with small flash-drive like sticks, and commdisks, which had to be placed behind their ears.

These commdots worked with the translation programs in the translator sticks and could translate to and from stored languages but they were limited to a maximum of four languages as well as cloning the facilities in their earpieces.

After their adventure in Dakata, Africa they were given an upgraded system, Daka Crystal-powered solid state commdisks that had a holographic element incorporated to allow it to match the wearer’s skin tone.

The dots no longer require a separate memory storage device or processor to translate or store the languages and the capacity had increased, so each disk can hold up to ten language databases consecutively while still doing real-time translation.

They could easily upload languages as required and incorporated in all the functions of phones and team communicators and used bone conductivity and subvocalising to speak and hear, they are totally silent when used in the field.

This is the team’s current form of communication.