As the team headed away from the London Eye, a quick discussion was held inside the raft with Jeeves joining in on a conference call. At the end of which, Mary called Mace on the team’s encrypted channel; “Mace, can you follow the Raft to the BASEment? You’ll find us hovering above a junkyard and then a hangar door will open up in a pile of junk – Adam has asked can you go in first, just follow the guide lights, they will take you into the Hangar. Please park beyond the yellow lines so there is space for the Raft to follow you in?”
Mace was surprised. They were revealing the location of their base after such a short period of time, “But Jeeves..?” Before she could finish her sentence, Jeeves spoke up over the same channel, “I can confirm that ah, Jeeves fully supports the team’s decision to trust you. Welcome to The Balance, young miss.”
As they decamped from the Raft, Mary stalked into the BASEment in a bad mood, her pipe, unlit, clenched between her teeth grumbling about not liking being played with, “…being put through our paces like a performing pony. What if anything serious had been going off at the same time?!”
She softened a bit, though, when her eye saw the girl, apparently known as Mace, standing by her powered-down cycle. “Well, there you are my girl. I hope you’ll feel at home here. No one will bother you when you don’t want – though young Akira’s a bit unpredictable, and some of Mikey’s inventions… well, enough of that. From today’s performance, it’s clear enough we stand in need of your particular expertise, and glad to have it. None of us could put a dent in the robo-dinosaur-thing, fake as it was, that’s a heads-up for any future encounter for sure. So welcome!”
Sam exited the raft and also went and congratulated Mace warmly on a job well done.
Akira rushed passed them, shouting “Souvenir!” He was clutching the remains of Rex’s damaged, mechanical head. How he’d acquired it and sneaked it onto the Raft, no-one could say for definite. He plonked it down on a plinth next to the case holding the Bargainers calling card.
Sam immediately followed him down the corridor and quickly admired Akira’s new team keepsake before making his apologies and heading towards the living quarters area.
Jeeves joined the two women as they passed through the formal meeting and trophy room, “There are four accommodation options young miss, if you’d like to consider residing here; Ms Wierdigan,” he indicated Mary, how many identities did this woman have anyway? He continued, “has a small apartment next to the boys but prefers to live in the settlement above. She has indicated that she would be happy for you to use it if you wish. She’s never stayed there.
Alternatively, there are also spare containers above, already equipped as flats, a bit utilitarian but that is where both Ms Wierdigan and I reside.
There is also a dormitory next to the team quarters that the younger Miss Mary sometimes uses when she is with us. She is currently staying with family in Newcastle and there are several beds available, though the space is shared.
Lastly, you could elect to do as Adam does and convert part of your workspace into an apartment. It would take a day at most to fit in ensuite facilities and partitions. The choice, should you wish to partake, are yours to choose… Alternatively I can show you the various entrances and ask Adam to install the access code for the hangar.”
As they walked, Jeeves continued, “The team has agreed to provide you with full site access so I do need to register you with Fra… the facility’s security system and with Mikey’s junkyard security. Full biometrics including DNA sensors I’m afraid.”
———————-
Sam headed straight to his room and immediately booted up his terminal; first things first, he checked the search parameters he’d worked up with Pseudo-Annie to investigate real Annie’s disappearance and try and find her current whereabouts.
Still nothing, it’s as though she had fallen off the face of the Earth.
He checked several search engines using all the keywords he could think of: Gabriel, Gabby, The Rapture Film, Superior Rex, Elvis Impersonator, London Bridge, etc. then contacted Dispatch to request any information on of the android, robot or whatever it was that called itself Gabriel and any of his known associates.
Other than learning how many Elvis impersonators there were worldwide and that London Bridge was a completely different bridge altogether, he didn’t get far. He did manage to identify that Gabriel was identical to a once famous B-movie star from the 40’s, a Gabriel Albright who’d died in a tragic car accident in 1948.
Dispatch did confirm that Gabriel had apparently first appeared (or should that be reappeared?) on New Year’s Eve 2000 in Paris in what was presumed to be a publicity stunt gone wrong. He remembered the incident; an apparent King Kong giant gorilla had climbed the Eiffel Tower just before midnight, only to vanish as the clocks struck 12. So that had been Gabriel’s doing?
It seemed that there had been other instances around the world of possible Gabriel visitations since. However, the incidents had either been allowed to play out to their sometimes dangerous but apparently non-lethal conclusions or had been dismissed as apocryphal. It helped that the egos of some superheroes may have meant many of the encounters hadn’t been reported.
He did discover what had apparently happened at Greenwich with the London Watch though. They too had struggled to deal with Rex and Gabriel. The water controller on their team, Marina had elected to pour a torrent of water on the Elvis’s and religious figures, only to almost drown a Hari Krishna who’d approached the group. Their trainee Moses, aka Lance when ‘working’, had to rescue him from the water.
They had finally stopped Rex, but not before it had already damaged the Observatory and injured, though thankfully not seriously, several civilians. Cheshire Cat had to teleport him from the scene, removed but not actually defeated, and Gabby had then decided to end the ‘audition’ and withdraw.
He did discover that the Bundesgarde team in Germany were currently missing, which might be related to another of Gabriel’s evaluations, though there was another possibility, they could be researching a cold case; something about several children who were kidnapped on Christmas Eve a year before.
According to the gossip on HeroNet the kids had been at a boarding school for young gentleman; ah, ‘de Berliner Schule für junge Herren’. There had been no ransom demands made surprisingly and the children, all aged between 6 and 10 were never found despite the Bundesgarde finding several clues leading to the Black Forest region. Why these children had been taken out of the thirty staying in the school over the Christmas period was another mystery; they weren’t all from the richest families or related.
Sam considered sending round a Balance Team bulletin via text message: suggesting they should investigate and spend some time in the Black Forest region, if there is a quiet patch in Wessex and London? However, they would need permission from Germany’s Federal Criminal Investigation Office (Bundeskriminalamt) if they were to operate officially on German soil and after all, the Bundesgarde had only been missing for a day. He tagged the information so he could keep a tab on it and wondered just how cold would the Black Forest region be in winter; Cold enough that the very thought of it made Sam shudder.
When Sam’s desperate search ended up running dry, he sent off an email to the Wildeman’s Grandad A.I. asking for his help finding Annie. He knew ‘he’ was most likely doing critical work trying to keep the world together and in the right dimension, but if anyone could perform any breakthroughs on his personal missing person’s case, he was sure it would be the Challenger-Wildeman family.
After that, Sam send off an application to Héros sans Frontières requesting group membership, proud and pleased that his paramedic skills were the final requirement for them to be recognised internationally.
He seriously considered spending the rest of his night idly refreshing his inbox waiting for a response, but these processes take time and it was late, a response so quickly would be very unlikely. He couldn’t help but smile even in privacy.
Finally, a chance to use the skills and training that Annie had bestowed and a chance to do more good in the world than be a meta-human flying, fire-breathing boxer.
Unable to rest and not yet ready to face the rest of the team, he decided to spend some downtime ‘reflecting’ in the Black Room.
As he walked from his room to ‘The Black Room’, he saw that there was mail. Checking, he found it included a large padded envelope from Israel. Excitedly, he tore open the envelope and discovered it contained two copies of the first edition of the Balance limited series (admittedly written in Hebrew) of their encounter with the G’Tach.
He skimmed the pictures and artwork from back to front, quite disbelieving. Fame at last, at least amongst the geek community. It had some truly fine artwork and the admittedly highly fictionalised storyline seemed more-or-less easy to follow. If this caught on over here, then visiting Comic-conventions wasn’t going to be the same again. He made a mental note to make sure to pass these by Jeeves as he seemed to be the man to go to on intellectual rights and property. He smiled, and put the copy down, something else to add to their trophies. Perhaps they could look into getting a translation, even if it was just for the souvenir cabinet?
Entering the room, he immediately started playing on the beams, going through his agility routine. However, a few minutes after entering the room he heard the door bang open and a smiling Mikey walk over to the barrel of balls. “Do you mind? I need something to take my mind of the catastrophe of my latest statue and nothing does that like pummelling someone with balls…”
Sam turned to approve Mikey’s entrance, to welcome her and managed to take a single breath in before a juggling ball hit him to the side of the cheek. He couldn’t help but laugh and rocked for a moment on one leg, trying to regain balance, stretching his wings out wide like a long balancing staff for tightrope walkers.
She tossed three more in the air, juggled them in a circle before tossing them at Sam’s head; hard and true. Sam laughed and immediately deflected the balls off his wings as he jumped from the first balancing beam to the second.
“Thanks for the help, Mikey!” He stopped to side-eye Mikey, waiting for his opportunity; he blasted his wings upward sending him off the beam in an attempted back flip and re-touched back on the beam a-la gymnast. While the flip was smooth, his landing was inches off centre and he tumbled clumsily to the side of the apparatus, slamming into the floor.
He lay there feigning injury just for a moment before bursting into laughter. He looked up at the young Mikey. “What was this statue that you were working on? Another junkpil’- and by that I mean walking, talking, fighting, exploding machine?”
“My entry for the Turner Prize…” As Sam’s jaw dropped, she giggled, “Ok, maybe not this year but at some point. I wanted to build an interactive artwork for a children’s playpark. Purely wind-driven and must be safe for kids to play on but…” She threw another ball, this time at the ceiling, it bounced off and hit Sam on his back, between his wings as he tried to remount the balancing beam. “Hah, howzat!?! Anyway, I need to think this through a bit more. It’s not as though my power can help with something like this. Anyway enough chat, time for total annihilation.”
———————-
Back in Akira’s room, another member of the team was struggling to sleep.
The embarrassment of spluttering salt, lemon and Tequila on all and sundry, had hit Akira hard. There had been a dream that night too, which he found quite disconcerting. In it, he had blatantly misused his powers to perform a risqué, karaoke/dance routine. This had to stop.
It was all very well trying to fit in, but he was different, he had been raised differently. Perhaps he had abandoned his vows a little hastily?
He remembered Hsi Feng’s offer of guidance and decided he would try to visit him at his dojo; possibly tomorrow.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to avow celibacy again; Mai Li had struck him as just the right kind of girl he should be looking to befriend. He’d never been tempted to quit vegetarianism however and was now sure that alcohol too was something he wouldn’t miss. He needed help to sort things out in his mind but felt that obedience to his own higher self was probably the way to go.
A decision reached, he found himself falling asleep at last.
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 