Superhero Adventures, UK Style

Inspired by the adventure – Emerald City Knights: Silver Storm
by Christopher McGlothlin

A couple of days after the Misconduct Trial –

There was enough sunshine to make most everyone glad to be alive, and seemingly all of Wessex had ventured outside to take advantage of it. Every downtown street was lined with people out roller-blading, walking their dogs, people-watching at cafes, or doing a little shopping. Bargain hunters were drawn to the locality and most local merchants had put on sales to greet them. Food and beverage carts weren’t hard to find. There are plenty of burgers and fries to be had, as well as Pad Thai, Teriyaki, as well as loads of other exotically named Eastern food.

A general call came out over Trouble Alert from the mysterious Dispatch; she wanted to know which HCP operatives were currently available in or around Wessex to investigate an Enforcement-protected convoy travelling through the city heading north; Banshee, Chrono, Young Sam and Akira all reported in as available to assist.

Dispatch went on to state that she had noticed an anomaly in the convoys signals (they appeared to be repeating previous calls exactly, so there was no variation in timing from previous calls). She requested that Chrono and Banshee cover the convoy and asked that Young Sam and Akira head to an underpass where she had first detected the lack of signal variation and investigate.

When Chrono and Banshee caught up with the convoy they watched a young teenager with a blue streak in her hair walk into the road between the tanker and the escort vehicles up front. She gestured and the tanker and rear convoy vehicle disappeared. The vehicles upfront pulled up sharply and in a split second the girl vanished, replaced. Superintendent Cunningham was now standing in the young girl’s place! Chrono proceeded to slow down time and realised that there was no-one actually there; instead a small hovering device, floating in the centre of her ‘body’ about the size of a flash drive was projecting the holographic solid light image of Superintendent Cunningham. Similar devices lay deactivated where each of the vanished trucks had been.

The holographic Superintendent ‘walked’ over to the remaining vehicles and explained to the drivers that they have been tricked and they needed to head back towards the underpass.

Chrono and Banshee elected to go there immediately.

At the underpass, just as Young Sam and Akira arrived, they heard a vehicle crash and saw a mist of silver particles drift out from one of the tankers where a car has rammed into the back of it. It looked as through the truck had originally been carrying four containers but all but one were gone and that one was cracked and spewing a silvery cloud.

Whoever the silver mist touched within seconds they had collapsed to the ground either unconscious or in agony as they began to change and mutate. A male pedestrian was transformed into a psychopathic octopus-like creature and immediately proceeded to grab three of the pedestrians who’d been passing by including a German tourist called Oskar wearing an out of season musical Christmas jumper which began to play under the pressure from the grappling tentacle. Another mutating victim, a young female was transformed into a beast-like creature and immediately started attacking people fleeing, who were as yet untouched by the silver cloud.

The cloud continued to spread and started to seep out from the underpass towards Young Sam and Akira and the people in the street above. Young Sam tried to use his wings to create a strong draft that blew some of the… whatever it was, back towards the truck while Akira used his telekinesis to do the same.

Akira got a psychic impression when he touched the vehicle of the other three tanks being removed by a team who then left heading towards London in a black unmarked grav-vehicle. They briefly discussed whether Sam should try and follow but they only had a direction and a rough idea of when had occurred to go on and reluctantly decided not to waste time trying to find the vehicle.

Arriving at the scene Banshee (having realised that the mist seemed to be alien in origin with a trace of artificial intelligence and was actually composed of some form of tiny mechanical objects that were attracted to potential meta-humans) in Mary-form she used her materialised harp to create an illusion of intense potential-meta life within the broken cylinder, attracting about half of the nanite cloud to change direction and re-enter the cylinder, whilst Chrono removed people watching above away from the scene, either putting them safely inside stores or away from the area completely.

Sam elected to use his fiery breath to weld the tank shut to stop any more of the ‘mist’ from escaping and Akira used his teleportal powers to teleport as many of the remaining tiny machines as possible back inside the tank before trying to enter the tank in astral form to see if he could lure the rest inside before Sam finished sealing the rip. It doesn’t work and he reluctantly returned to his body whilst Mary used her Lullaby to calm the octopus-like male causing him to release his prisoners and start to revert to a more normal form, while Sam, after failing to influence the new meta-human with his power of suggestion, caught two of the dropped captives no long held aloft by the tentacles but failed to catch the German tourist unfortunately. At this point they began to realise that there might be a third activated meta-human down in the underpass, someone who could apparently create illusions as the background began to alter into a jungle environment and the number of people in the underpass multiplied.

The animalistic female was grappled by Sam but quickly escaped due to her difficult to grasp vigorous writhing. It is during this time that Chrono appeared beside him and said “If I may?” and use a lightning-quick knock-out punch to the transformed meta-humans’ temple, slumping her to the floor without further harm.

Akira used his mystical senses to work out which of the figures were illusions and where the illusion-maker was hiding and when Mary failed to put him to sleep resolved the situation by blasting the individual unconscious.

Chrono then used his time-slowing powers to smash the last of the silver mites which were already disintegrating as he grabbed handfuls of them out of the air and smashed them into the ground.

Finally the Enforcement vehicles caught up with them and their officers started to take the new meta-humans into care as well as helping the injured.

The four of them started to help and it was at this point that Young Sam heard what he thought was a young girl crying from underneath a vehicle. He picked the vehicle up and moved it out of the way and saw a young woman behind it partially hidden in the shadows. The smell of spilt diesel stopped him from smelling anything else. The red-haired young woman crawled towards as she reached out to him, Sam knelt down to help her and an oh-so-cold white blade slashed out at his thigh breaking a scale and almost piercing his leg!

Chrono reacted immediately and slowed things down to disarm her but found that holding the blade was causing frostbite. He dropped the blade in agony just as the girl produced a second, metallic blade from a wrist guard and punctured Sam’s thigh and a few drops of blood dripped down the blade.

Sam was left bloodied and bruised by this attack; and this was the worst wounding he has ever received since his time of transformation, and he was – again – left with more questions than answers.

The girl, who Banshee now realised, may have been the figure that had been following Sam previously, produced a blast of icy cold at Sam and vanished into the shadows. Sam’s last image of her was the same pattern imprinted on his retinas as he’d seen on the back of her wrist sheath; that of Setekh.

They examined the ornate white blade that appeared to have been carved from some organic material – possibly a large and ancient tooth? The blade itself didn’t prove to have any mystical powers but a reading of it by Akira revealed it to be older than humanity and a ritualistic object. It was the intense cold produced by the girl that had allowed it to pierce Sam’s scales.

Only one thing left to do, Chrono ‘arrested’ the German tourist’s excessively loud (in every sense of the word) Christmas jumper and told him to leave.

A quick examination of the scene revealed that some sort of burnt out devices placed either side of the tunnel were used to create a forcewall that the tanker must have crashed into and the vehicle following behind then crashed in it going from the crumped front and rear of the tanker. Cars following on then crashed into the rear of the escort vehicle causing the crash that Akira and Sam heard when they had first arrived.

In the meantime as they left the underpass they realised that all the lights and computers systems in the street above has gone crazy. Cars and buses had crashed into each other due to all the traffic light signals showing green and a gas main had cracked causing one of the nearby buildings to catch fire.

Strange technical malfunctions had occurred; traffic systems had frozen, safety systems had failed to engage, and communication systems had faltered. As a result, several accidents had occurred.

Akira did another mystical scan and realised that there was yet another person transformed by the miniscule silver machines who had been rendered insubstantial and was now trapped inside of the computer systems, drifting in panic from one to another. The group looked at each other and wondered, was anyone of them technologically skilled? They realised that was a gap they needed to resolve.

Sam and Banshee elected to try to terrorise some of the people hiding in the shops to leave and head to safety but were only partially successful. Akira tried to teleport the trapped meta-human out of the computer systems but only caused parts of the equipment to materialise in front of him. It seemed he couldn’t teleport out insubstantialised people. Banshee then used her harp to calm the person inside the machines and he collapsed and rematerialised as a young unconscious Goth in the street.

The computer systems stopped malfunctioning and the blue light services started to get through to rescue the injured drivers and passengers.

They saw a young woman with transparent skin strip off her robe-like clothes, douse herself in water and attempt to get through the flames from the gas main explosion. Chrono stepped forward and stopped her as Young Sam used himself as a shield to stop the flames fuelled from the shattered gas main from spreading and then used his claws and abnormal strength to try and seal the crack under earth and rubble. Chrono told the woman to wait outside and he would try to rescue the young boy trapped inside. Using his power to slow down time he managed to reach the child but was then trapped behind a wall of flame.  Akira tried to create a portal to him but it materialised on the opposite side of the wall of flames causing Chrono to wrap the child inside his coat with him and then risked jumping through the flame and into the portal. He materialised outside in the street but with his favourite (actually his only) coat on fire and he he had to throw it on the ground and stamp on it to get the flames out. Thankfully it was only singed!

The meta-human breakout crisis resolved, the four of them started to help with rescuing the remaining trapped people and got introduced to Chrysalis the girl with transparent skin who despite having no superpowers beyond slightly toughened skin had been willing to try to brave the flames anyway.

After all the people had been taken care of, they could now start to stand down and were introduced to the local fire service and police officers and in particular the local Police Inspector Marcus Tolliver who was a tall, dignified black gentleman, looking a good decade younger than his actual 55 years.

He asked the characters if they were familiar with a particular superhero from the 80’s, Protector. “He’s my uncle. He was an inspiration to me — to a lot of us,” the Inspector related. “Welcome to Wessex.” he said as he shook their hands.

He warned them that a number of reporters had arrived and were waiting for an interview with them.

At this point, Chrono’s comms rang – it was young Suzi from the restaurant. His office roof had collapsed in! Rushing back he found that he’d had a visit from Death Metal in his absence and she had left him a little token of her affection. She had ripped one of the girders out of the warehouse roof and moulded it into a heart shape. Realising there was nothing he could do there currently he headed back to join the others.

Back at the crash site and sitting in a nearby undamaged restaurant the four of them met with a number of reporters and were asked a number of questions that they were less than forthright about answering with Chrono doing the majority of the talking.

Michelle Crawford (News1): “What do you call yourselves and how did the team come together? “

Chrono: “We don’t call ourselves anything other than I am Chrono, this is Banshee, Young Sam and Akira…”

Wes’ Preston (Vixen Media): “What exactly are your powers?”

Everyone agreed that they’d prefer to not reveal the full extent of their powers and Akira mentioned that they just wanted to help people…

Roy Vitch (Wessex Gazette): Why do you call yourself Young Sam? How old are you and are you an alien or a meta-human?”

Young Sam struggled to explain his origins and ignored the age question.

At that point Kayla Feraz (Gossip Columnist for the Sun): started getting personal with Young Sam “Can you… you know? Or has that been changed as well?” Even the other reporters seemed embarrassed by this line of questioning and they quickly elected to move the questions on.

Michelle Crawford asked “What experience has the group got and what makes them different to other superhero teams in the country? “

Again the PC’s attempted to try and not discuss their specific powers or their previous experience at this time.

Roy Vitch (Wessex Gazette): “Does the group have a sponsor?”

That opened up a half serious debate amongst them over whether an alcohol manufacturer as a sponsor (such as Johnny Walkers) was better in this instance that some builders (given Chrono’s need for major repairs to his office). It was obvious to the reporters by this point that this would not be an informative or serious interview and they would not get many useful quotes…

Kayla Feraz shouted out to Mary “I notice you have an Irish accent? You are an Irish Meta-human aren’t you? Do you feel that Irish Meta-humans should publicly apologise for the assassination of the Queen a couple of years ago?”

Banshee elected to leave that as simply a “Yes, Yes and No” and moved quickly on.

There were a few other general questions asked then Kayla Feraz ended the interview when she asked “Is it true Chrono you mainline drugs to give you your powers?” He jokingly replied “yes I mainline caffeine” and the interview was declared over.

As they left Roy Vitch warned them that if they didn’t name themselves soon that reporters would likely do it for them.

Afterwards, while surveying the damage at Chrono’s office (and after he had had to endure being shouted at by Mama Chi and after Eddie had tried to use his head as a slapping post for endangering them all), they discussed what assistance they could give Chrono to repair his office and whether they should sell the blade. In the end they elected to offer it for a ‘recovery fee’ to the Artefact Research Centre and a quick phone call resulted in an initial offer to the group of £20,000 as a down payment and possibly more later once it had been fully evaluated.

Akira was also offered a place to stay at Container Town with Mary and Sam.

In the meantime Sam cut the sculpted metal beam loose and Chrono insisted on placing it over by the (fake) fireplace…

The papers next day contained reports of the fight against the Stormers and the rescues; most leading with a heroic picture taken by Tony Jason of Young Sam lifting up the truck to try and rescue the girl.

The papers generally referred to them as taking up the mantle of the now retired Wessex Warriors and some had taken to calling them the Storm-Chasers.

However they also had a page 6 article in The Sun; Kayla Feraz’s Gossip Column which was generally negative and ended with the paragraph “The freak calling himself ‘Little Sam’ seems to be under the illusion that his breakout has made him ‘kin to dragons’ with is a serious worry in one so new to the superhero scene.”