This takes place ten days after returning from St. Kilda
Part 1 – White Kings Pawn to E4
Annie entered their offices above the Jade Garden Restaurant, having first popped in downstairs to say “zǎoshang hǎo” to Mama Chi and promise that she and Sam would visit that evening for a meal and to wish her customers, and especially the wedding reception booked in for that night, good fortune. A ‘real’ red dragon visiting to wish them good luck? Absolutely priceless!
She bent down and picked up the post. It was already late morning as she’d been out working since she’d left Sam sleeping at 3am, dealing with a corporate espionage case involving a stolen recipe. She’d finally discovered evidence that it had been the owner’s brother who’d had secretly sold the information to their competitor himself, so they could then attempt to sue their competitor. He’d tried to blame the theft on an intern but failed to realise that the young lady was really into online gaming providing her with a digital fingerprint at the same time as she was supposedly at work, logging in to steal the data from her employer’s server. Annie’d only had to break in to their office, bypass their security measures, check out who’d last opened the staff password database and accessed their internal security cameras to confirm who’d been working in the building when her terminal had remotely logged in and downloaded the recipe. The brother might have got away with it if he hadn’t had to visit and physically switch on her workstation first. It might make it difficult to pick up their fee, though she supposed suggesting they might release the story to the press if they didn’t pay both the intern reasonable compensation and their fee, may work.
She walked to the desk and opened the small parcel first. It contained a chess piece, a white pawn and nothing else. Curious, she examined the wrappings; printed parcel label, self-adhesive stamp, no return address. She opened her desk drawer and taking out the fingerprint powder, checked it inside and out for fingerprints. There were several on the outside of the packaging only, she’d check of course but they probably all belonged to the postal staff. The pawn itself had no prints.
She put it down and checked the rest of the mail; mostly bills and spam-mail. She then picked up the chess piece again. Classic design, old, made of actual ivory. That dated it; the sale of ivory items was banned in 1990.
She switched on the answerphone as she examined the piece, several general enquiry messages, then “hello? I need to speak with the Balance. I need to know what happened to Fizzgig…” Ah, that name tied into something Sam had mentioned – he’d said that when they’d first met Mace they’d been dealing with a group of meta-misfits called the ‘Untouchables, one of whom had been called Fizzgig. The voice on the phone was male, young, hint of German in the pronunciation. “What happened to her when we..? Brittney and Yazz, you know them as Solvent and Blackstuff; they have gone missing and Britt’ left me a message that Charlie, Fizzgig, had asked to talk to them privately. I haven’t seen either of them now for three days. I am worried; I really need to speak to her. Have you had any contact with her since China Town? I, I… You can contact me on…” a mobile number followed. A quick check confirmed it was an unregistered pay-as-you-go account.
So, is this a case of two people running away, possibly from someone who is over-controlling or something else? Then a message came on, “Kings Pawn to E4…” and went dead. The voice had been male, older, cultured. She looked at the pawn in her hand. To E4 was a standard opening move for white. What gives? Then, “Hi its Tony, sorry Adam’s not picking up. Just wanted to have a chat, can someone ask him to call me? Just wanted to find out what happened last night.”
She phoned Jeeves to ask him to pass on the message only for Jeeves to point that Adam had been staying over at Tony’s and hadn’t come back yet. Yes, he’d tried calling him but his phone was not being picked up. She got the number. The phone was still on and she was able to hack his account and activate its GPS. To her surprise, it was stationary. She checked the location, grabbed her coat and headed out.
Forty-five minutes later, she found his phone in an alley near the Castle. There was no sign of Adam however. What was going on? She picked up the phone. It was undamaged thankfully; in fact, it had to have placed where she’d found it, on top of a wall. She’d check for fingerprints once she got it back to the ‘bat cave’ but… She pressed the back button to see when it had been used last. It showed an app; a chess game, showing just one move – Kings Pawn to E4! A search of the user history showed the phone hadn’t been used for over 11 hours.
Part 2 – In the darkness, vanished without a trace – Black Kings Pawn to E5
Everyone seemed busy this morning. Jeeves was running around, apparently worried about Adam who still hadn’t come back from staying over at Tony’s. Apparently, Annie was looking into it. Mary didn’t have time to worry about it as a call came in for her at that point from Rory who’d been trying to adjust to becoming a dad of an adult daughter. The video call came through on her private channel. “Hi Rory, how’s fatherhood?” He grimaced, “It’s a whole new experience but I thought I’d best warn you. Something weird happened last night at the M.E.T.A. detention facility where we were processing the Stormers from St. Kilda. It seemed we have a locked room mystery; two metas vanished right in front of the security cameras. One minute they are in their separate rooms and a second later, gone. Vanished. Pouf! It was the kid with earthquake powers and ah, what did you call him? Tangleweb? You’d dealt with him before hadn’t you? It may be nothing but thought you ought to know just in case he turns up again? They’d had no joy communicating with him you know?
Ah, changing the subject, Mary’s trying to talk me into training her to use the Illustrious armour, do you think I should or not? This parenting lark is a lot harder than I expected…”
Mary chuckled sympathetically. Her reply in answer to Rory’s question was gently positive. “I think it would be an excellent idea to give your daughter proper training in using the armour. If you don’t – she being a MacCarty – she’ll only try to teach herself. Besides, what better kind of bonding-exercise to help you learn about each other? Go for it. As for the Meta’s vanishing – that’s kind of reminiscent of things that have happened when a certain speedster got involved with us, last seen working for one or another of these sets of initials… I’ll check with my friends and see what they think. Meanwhile I think we may have a new problem of our own… One of our support team, of our family’s gone missing.”
Part 3 – White Kings Bishop to C4
Day eleven after St. Kilda
Akira was worried and not just about Adam’s disappearance. Over the last week, he’d had been suffering severe and painful cramps in his right arm every night after he’d fallen asleep. The pain had been sufficient that he’d asked Hsi Feng to have a look. He’d ran a crystal on a silver chain over his arm and the pain and cramps vanished only to return again once he finally fell asleep. He’d even stayed awake for a whole day and night and hadn’t suffered any twinges only to find that the following night it returned. Annie couldn’t find any reason for it and the Sensei knew something, but insisted he couldn’t help. Then this morning, not only had he slept in but… No pain or spasms this time but when he’d awoken he found a pattern on his arm, dark against his pale skin, a pattern that resembled a weaving snake as though someone had used henna on him as a joke, except this mark radiated a darker aura that he did. It wasn’t evil as such but he felt… contaminated, for some reason.
He’d made his usual morning trek to the Dojo of Sensei Hsi Feng to ask him about his newly acquired brand but was met by the gate by the old man himself, very worried looking. “Mai-Li is missing, Akira. She failed to turn up this morning. She’s never missed a day before and I’m worried. I cast a location spell but all it found was this in her room.” He held out his hand. It was a white ivory chess piece, a Bishop.
Akira tried to use his abilities on it, first his postcognition but received only a feeling of intense anger, loneliness, blood and… a sense of being underground. He tried to focus his mystical energies on Mail-Li herself and… He could sense nothing. He asked for something belonging to her and the Sensei send one of his acolytes to bring him a small jade pin. “This was Mai-Li’s most precious possession. It used to belong to her mother and she handled it most days.” Akira thanked him, took it in his hands and concentrated. Seconds became minutes as his focus sharpened; he saw her going to the gate. It was dark, last night? Then he ‘heard’ a giggle followed by… nothing, the vision went blank. It was as though she’d vanished from off the planet. Absolutely nothing. A complete void as though she no longer existed. What the..?
On the outside wall opposite the compound was a graffiti drawing. It was a series of squares like a chessboard with three pieces moved; two black and white pawns confronted each other whilst a white bishop was also in the middle of the board. Was this drawing related to Mai-Li’s disappearance somehow?
Part 4 – Failure as a step to success – Black Queens Pawn to E6
Day twelve after St. Kilda
Annie had been working full out for two days now trying to find Adam but without success. All her efforts to date had failed to lead beyond the alley where she’d found his phone. She’d walked up the stairs and went to open the office door then stopped. There was a tiny scratching sound coming from inside the office. One of the team, Akira, could be inside possibly but… She unlocked the door and looked around. The office appeared empty and everything seemed normal but she felt as though she was missing something, Just not sure what exactly. There was no sign of whatever had caused the tiny scratching sound and she considered the possibility that they might have rats. She walked inside slowly, carefully and then she saw it. On the shelves behind the desk was a chess piece, a carved, ivory-white Queen. Then she felt a touch on her shoulder and a bright flash of light like they were standing outside in the sun.
Whatever this was, hadn’t expected Annie’s hyper-reactions or her immense strength. She reacted instantly, punching behind her which caused whatever had tried to grab her to fly across the room towards the door as she instantly dived over the desk and grabbed for Chrono’s baseball bat he kept beside the filing cabinet. She grabbed it, rolled to her feet whilst kicking the desk clean across the room towards her assailant and landing on her feet, baseball bat raised ready to strike. Instead, all she saw was an intense flare of brilliant bright light and… Nothing. There was no one there but there was now a circular pattern near the door; the desk was missing a circular section as was the carpet and part of one of the cabinets. She analysed the flash, rerunning the instant when the pulse of light flared – and saw what she’d missed before, an outline in the centre of the flash, skinny, small, humanoid, female(?) which instantly vanished as did the section of the desk and carpet that had been touched by the sphere of light surrounding her.
Part 5 – White Queen to H5
Adam had been missing for two days now. The team had used every contact they had and still nothing. Annie’d even hacked into the Russian Satellite surveillance system to see if she could see where Adam had gone to after entering the alleyway but none of the satellites were in a good position to confirm anything other than he entered but apparently never left the alley. Her own recent experiences made her search for bright flashes of light but again nothing. Adam had just vanished.
Mary was again going over the security files from the St. Kilda operation – as well as the missing Unity, the Omegadrone, Deep one and Leech were also all unaccounted for during the mop-up operation. She assumed the Deep One being aquatic had simply swam away but the others? A major investigation into the work of P.I.S.C.E.S. was also ongoing, but given its covert status there was nothing in the public domain, though Frankie had managed to somehow access a selection of redacted files that related to the island base and to its founding. In typical British melodrama, the head of the agency was simply referred to as ‘R’.
As for their current mission, she was glad to hear that the majority of the container of parasites had been destroyed after several were collected for further experimentation by the CSB and all of the staff identified by the Balance as infected had been rounded up and taken into custody, temporarily being held at the Deep Six detention facility until a reliable means of extracting the creatures could be found. They did try to duplicate the extraction method they’d used on Dalton but the host had unfortunately died. The chief medical officer present did confide to Rory that he suspected the parasite had killed its host and itself rather than be extracted, but would not be willing to say that on the record. As Mary considered what they needed to do now another call came in, this one marked with the code signal for personal, family-related.
It was Rory again. Without waiting he burst out, “Jean’s gone missing. She never came back from a session earlier today. I’ve checked the building security cameras and she vanished from the stairwell between the 4th and 3rd floors of the hospital. What’s going on?”
Part 6 – White Queen to F7
Day 14
Adam had been missing now for four days and Jean for two and still they had no clues. As they all joined in the recreational room for a team briefing, the big screen suddenly activated on its own; the screen flashed a single word, multiple times over and over again – just one word “Checkmate?” It then went black and a map reference overlaid on a map flashed up, showing a green oasis near the centre of London and a time and a date; Today’s date and just sufficient for Mace to fly the team there in either the Raft or the Crate. A quick online check showed that the map reference confirmed the location as the centre of Richmond Park.
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 