Banshee and Akira stood on the edge of the park trying to tempt the young sociopath to move away from the surrounding buildings he was hammering with his misses. Inspector Tolliver had already called in Armed Response but was hoping to avoid having to issue a shoot to kill order.
Despite the attack being deliberately directed at them, neither Akira nor Banshee wanted the man’s death on their hands if they could avoid it. A blast shot out aimed at Banshee. It missed her by several yards but did succeed in destroying the corner of a nearby empty tenement building. Lousy shot, powerful attack…
This was the third so-called mystical assault on them since the bounty had been posted. Lone individuals had carried out all three assaults up to now, thankfully; the prize on offer seemed to be of more interest to individuals than teams, so far.
The first two attacks had been by mages with actual power but they had been defeated, by the team working together. This time it was an acne-ridden young man armed with a mystical artefact and no real powers of his own. The artefact was some form of wand and resembled a shrivelled bit of blue and purple root or tentacle that shot powerful destructive beams, though without a great deal of accuracy.
Good thing too as the team was currently only at half its normal strength. Mace had to be somewhere looking up a lead to whatever it was she didn’t want to talk about with the others and Annie had elected to arrange for both Sam and Adam to accompany her to their parents’ house for a couple of days.
Their attacker was a Stefan Wolfe, a 22 going on 16, overweight, lonely and depressed man with a serious hatred of other people. How he’d managed to get his hands on such a powerful artefact was unknown.
Banshee responded with an aura of fear, which left their attacker partially dazed and shaking with dread. Akira used the opportunity to render himself invisible, move in close to their attacker and grab at the wand with the intention of transforming it into sand. As he touched it he felt it resist the transformation. It should have turned to sand but didn’t. Akira felt it glisten with unrestrained power, not radiating evil, only immense mystical power.
Akira grabbed it loose from the attackers hand whereupon it seemed to vanish as it too was rendered invisible and Akira momentarily felt it magnify his own mystical powers.
Disarmed, Stefan collapsed to the ground as his power source vanished, only to hear Banshee walk over and start to lecture him about respecting his elders and not trying to blast their heads into smithereens instead.
Despite Stefan being reduced to tears and cowering in terror at the loss of wand, they did manage to ask him where he’d got it from before the Police whisked him off in handcuffs to the back of a van. To their surprise, he claimed not to know only that the wand and information about the bounty had appeared in the post. Nearby they can hear Marcus arguing heatedly with a dishevelled Police Inspector from a specialist unit called CI-13 about jurisdiction of the prisoner.
He went on to explain that he had recognised that this was a wand of power, the first time he touched it he had almost disintegrated his bedroom and he’d come to the park so he could try out the wands power when who should turn up but the Police and then both of them; opportunity knocking.
After he had been locked in the van, Akira, still invisible, offered to teleport Banshee back to the BASEment and touched her shoulder as he opened a portal to their base.
As they teleported into the teleport room, everything felt off; the lights in the base seem defused, off somehow and the air smelt of rotting fish. The homing Crystal Akira used as a beacon was cracked in two and now radiated a dim, blood red light. The floor and walls at the entrance side of the room were covered in alien-looking blood-red vines emanating out from around the edges of the smashed door to the corridor.
Had they somehow found or caused an interdimensional breach? Banshee reached out with her mystical senses to see what she could find. To her surprise, it all felt very real to her senses. Despite the change to the Basement since they’d left about 30 minutes before, nothing felt off despite the alien nature of what they could see.
There was a feeling of evil emanating from somewhere though.
Akira felt that this intrusion was not necessarily something they had brought in with them when they’d teleported back; the plants all seemed too well established for that. No this definitely felt extra-dimensional, he was sure, though not necessarily mystical but whatever it was it had come through to their universe sometime before their arrival back. The shattered crystal continued to relentlessly pulse.
There was giggling coming from the growth of plants by the door and as they looked closer, they could see a horde of small insect-like creatures hiding within the foliage. These ‘insects’ were the size of a cockroach, had four spike-like limbs and appeared to be primarily teeth with wings. As they looked, the horde headed towards them at speed.
Dozens of them flowed through the twists and folds in the damaged door in their direction, a skittering, giggling sound emanated from their chattering teeth. Banshee immediately unleashed a terrorising wail. The blast forced them to turn back and hide within the foliage around the battered door as though preparing for another attack, a feeling of immense hunger stemmed from their joint consciousness.
For the moment, Banshee and the still invisible Akira were trapped in the room with the swarm of winged teeth blocking their only exit. These were not like anything they had ever seen before.
Akira considered using a banishment spell. He still held the wand and was reasonably sure it could magnify the effects of his spells if he wanted to risk it – it was still an unknown element though. Were these creatures evil or chaotic in some way? All he knew for sure was that they were non-Terrestrial in origin.
Banshee again checked with her mystical senses. Nothing around them radiated magic just a sense of wrongness as though some of the laws of physics no longer applied. If this was another mystical assault, it was unlike anything they’d ever encountered before.
Akira dug deep inside himself, trying to avoid accessing the power of the wand for now and unleashed the Fourth Wheel of Weyan creating a mystical storm of wind that forced the creatures back through the gaps in the door and crushing the remaining swarm against the wall of the room with a sickening squelch.
“Just wish I could completely remove the fishy odour, though it does now smell a bit fresher now I’ve cleared the room,” He muttered as the spell evaporated.
They moved to the door, forced it open and stepped out into their lounge. This room was completely covered from floor to ceiling in the alien blood red blooms, vines and thorns and they could hear the chatter and giggling of the winged teeth hiding somewhere amongst the foliage, out of sight but not out of mind.
It felt as though this room had been infested for quite some time. They did their best to avoid the remaining swarms and headed downstairs towards the sub-basement and the kitchen. When they had left both Jeeves and Mikey had been in the building, Jeeves having just finished making breakfast for everyone.
As well as the carpet and cascade of the alien blooms everywhere, the stairwell and corridor they were walking down was badly damaged as though it had been subject to a major attack; cracks and craters everywhere. This felt as though they’d been away for a lot longer that they should have been.
Banshee turned insubstantial and headed with Akira towards the kitchen – a sweet metallic pungent smell assaulted their noses. They opened the door and saw a dead body in the middle of the kitchen floor, literally ripped in half. Recognition was instantaneous – it was Jeeves. Something had torn his body in half and whilst Jeeves had still been alive going by the trail of blood and entrails that showed his still living upper torso had tried to drag itself away from his killer and his severed lower torso before succumbing to blood loss and shock. Banshee stepped over and kneeling down, closed his eyelids. This had been an act of sheer butchery.
Something or someone had torn him in half. Akira reached over and touched Jeeves’ head as he tried to call up his ability to view the past.
Then he saw it; the moment of Jeeves’ death. An alien image of a centipede-like creature, its legs or arms seemed countless as it reared the upper segment of its towering body above Jeeves. This creature was easily 4 or 5 metres long, with sharp pincers on its tentacle mouth that had severed their poor Butlers’ body in two with a single snap. The only decoration on the creature, at approximately the middle of its body, was something resembling a tool-belt filled with what looked like wands and artefacts of various descriptions. Akira could ‘see’ the dying Jeeves attempt to pull his upper body away from the creature and die seconds later.
Did the presence of the tool belt signify the creature was sentient? The vision of Jeeves’ death certainly didn’t – the attack was instantaneous, unprovoked and utterly brutal. What had really felt weird was at no time during the vision had he felt any sense of anger or animosity from it. It hadn’t tried to eat Jeeves or torture him further after the initial, admittedly deadly attack. It was almost as though it had been playing when it cut him in half.
“We’re looking for a nasty big worm Mary, bigger than Young Sam and nasty looking.” He went on to describe exactly what he’d seen in his vision.
They checked out the other rooms. There was a strong smell of rotting food coming from the pantry, which showed that power seemed to have been cut quite some time ago. Something that confirmed their theory that time was running faster here than it had been when they’d left. How long does it take for frozen meat and fish to thaw and rot anyway? The power appeared to have been off for several days
The only surprise was that the ever-present blood blooms were missing in the pantry whilst managing to be present everywhere else. The checked out all of the rooms on this floor but beyond the all-invasive plants and the occasional chatter from a scouting bug they were empty.
They headed back up the stairs towards their lounge and the giggling. The creatures obviously had no memory of being terrorised previously. Banshee unleashed another of her terrorising shrieks as they stepped up the stairs driving several chattering swarms of the alien bugs into the open door of the teleport room as Akira slammed the door as shut they quickly checked out the other rooms. They could help but notice that there was a slight distortion of sound, almost as though they were hearing underwater. Another of the little mysteries to consider whilst they tried to figure out what had happened here.
Thy checked out all of the rooms as they went passed. The Communications room looked as though it had been the scene of a major assault and the computer equipment was in pieces. Going by the amount of water pooled on the ground, it was possible that the attack on the computer systems had been ice-based.
The blast doors to the surface had been fully sealed shut and were now locked firmly in place. Annie’s ‘Nostromo’ security protocol activated in the event of an attack and called for all exits to be locked down until the attack was neutralised.
Banshee tried to phase through the thick blast door to see what was on the other side. Had this infestation made its way to the surface via the lift into container town? Despite her best efforts and her insubstantial state, it was like trying to swim through treacle and then she hitting a solid barrier that refused to give, She extracted herself and tried again with the same result. That definitely shouldn’t be possible, something or someone was trying to keep them trapped down here.
Akira tried to astral project himself through the security door and to his amazement encountered the same deterrent. He couldn’t flow through it even in astral form nor could he see what was on the other side. What the..?
Failing that, they could also try and get out the hangar door. It wasn’t a blast door after all so might be easier to break through.
They started to walk down the security corridor towards the Junkyard entrance and their meeting room. Outside the room, the bug-like creatures followed for a while, looking for other opportunities to attack but soon gave up.
Several of the security doors they passed had been forced open and the traps had been sprung and were apparently now deactivated. All, except for the gravity trap by the exit to the Junkyard. The security door had been activated just like the container town exit but the grav trap was still functioning. Four G’s of force in operation forced against the roof indicated by the rubble floating on the roof of the chamber and the pockmarks showing that these boulders had been present when the grav generator had created the thrust.
Banshee turned Akira insubstantial as well as herself and they proceeded to enter and cross the trap, unaffected by the gravity increase and stepped into what should have been their meeting room area; except that the floor had been demolished completely, exposing the training chamber below which had become flooded at some point. Several metres of water – possibly from the well, which was spewing forth mucky water – now filled the floor below, a red and thorny seaweed covered much of the water’s surface. In the water itself, the occasional wave seemed to indicate something was down there moving under the surface. The meeting table and trophy cabinets had collapsed in with the floor and now stuck out like wooden icebergs.
Then they heard a cah-cawing sound echoing round the chamber and looked up to see a flock of skeletal-looking reptilian ‘birds’ with 2 metre-wide wingspans possibly as many as a dozen of the creatures swooping towards them. Despite currently being insubstantial, they couldn’t help notice that these creatures also seemed to be at least partially phased.
Akira immediately created a force cage around the creatures but they just proceeded to phase through the walls of the cage and kept on coming. He realised his shields would be similarly flawed. The creatures hit and despite their insubstantial state their attack hurt, their claws raked at their ghost-like state. Akira dodged some but was hit by several phased claws doing injury and leaving him cut and bruised. Banshee came of worse and felt them hitting and slamming into her body leaving her dazed.
They then flew back and prepared for a second attack. Unable to move and defend at the same time because of her injuries, Banshee forced herself to stand and unleashed the full force of her banshee wail as they flew straight at them; the notes of her scream shredded the first group of the spectral creatures causing several of them to dissipate. As she collapsed from exhaustion, Akira followed it up with a mystical blast at the remainder of the flock causing them to disintegrate into smoke.
Then, on the next level down at the far side of the chamber, they could see the centipede-like creature in the doorway. Whatever had affected the training chamber and flooded it had also distorted the room somehow as it clear that from their side of the chamber the water was several metres deep yet at the creatures side the water merely lapped at the door frame. The floor beneath the water must have collapsed at their side but into what or else this chamber was distorted somehow but if so, how? Before they could question it further, their attention was again caught by the creatures movements in the doorway as it forced its front segment to rear up, centaur-like.
They also noticed that one of the wands in its ‘belt’ was similar but not completely identical, to the wand still held in Akira’s hand. As they watched the creature, it spoke a quiet voice that carried across the chamber. Its words were in English even if its sentence structure was not.
“Ah, found us you have. Of the Unspoken am I. Offer I make – brought here and bargain made did we. Kill you we must and slowly do but, offer one we make. Sleep into we can put, so pain endurable if surrender you will. Offer once we do only. Hatred missing, want survival here we at price any, contact make we with mage earthborn. Accept you will or fight, pain and death bring we.”
Surprised at the English words coming from the centipede’s mouth, they refused the offer. As they looked down, they saw ebbs in the water as something huge swam beneath the weeds and surface.
Akira quickly cast the Somnambulant Spell of Sirrion to create a thin pink mist rise up from the ground around the creature opposite them in the hope of making the creature itself sleep. As the pink mist dissipated, it moved its manipulators as though to confirm it had failed. “umm, powerful are you, Jarth approves…” Akira replied, “Well, sleep I thought you might like, as offered us also.”
The creature shuddered slightly and stood waiting in the doorway which prior to flooding had been even with the floor of the lower chamber.
Having fought off the effects of the spectral attack both still remained insubstantial. Banshee and Akira looked down and saw raising out of the water, a fish-like creature of immense size, easily over five metres long, like a cross between a catfish and an eel, with a lamprey-like mouth. From just around the head four long tentacles, blue-purple in colour extended out and its triangular head and beak-like nose, ignored because of the circle of serrated teeth beneath and row of three single eyes each set on top of each other. The creature gave of the strong pungent fish-like smell that had been haunting them since they had teleported in.
Banshee refocused on the creature opposite and unleashed her wail, which resounded across the enlarged chamber. To her surprise and horror, it just shook it off. Then the both felt it coming from the water beneath them, a strong compulsion to let go, to fall into the water, to re-enter creation’s womb and accept their fate. The phrase “Take back” came unbidden to their minds. Both Banshee and Akira found themselves focusing and breaking the spell… Take back? Take back what? Take back the wand possibly which so resembled the tip of the creatures tentacles if it had been dried out? The wand still held firmly in Akira’s hand. He considered dropping the wand into the water then the idea drifted away as they considered their options.
In insubstantial form, they decided to fly towards the corridor entrance and through the creature guarding the doorway. As they set off at speed to try and cross the chamber the centipede unleashed a blast of eldritch energy which hit and unleashed it surge on his incorporeal form leaving him staggered by the attack.
Thankfully, Akira continued to be propelled by Banshee who was retaining both their flight and their insubstantiality as he forced his remaining will into a barrier of TK to force the centipede away from the doorway and into the shallow waters of the room as they prepared to land in the entrance.
A wave of compulsion again washed over them from deep in the water. An urge they managed to again reject as they went to land only to realise that gravity was somehow localised beyond the chamber and what should have been ‘up’ was now gravity’s ‘down’. Even insubstantial they could feel the pull of gravity from above them claiming them if they changed back. It felt as though they were flying upside down. Banshee turned in the entranceway and landed feet-side up on the ceiling as she changed back into Mary. The centipede creature was slowly proceeding towards them through the shallows, waving several of its manipulators/legs in a pattern as the now substantiated Mary tried to focus on casing a spell. As the pattern was accomplished, the ceiling began to warp into a number of tentacles and hands, which tried to grab at their ankles and legs formed out of the roof components.
Akira dodged the grasping appendages forming from the ceiling as it warped, but Mary felt one of the ‘hands’ grab her ankle and hold on as other manifested hands worked their way across the surface of the ceiling towards her. No time to waste, Mary began to spellweave the Breath of Manannán to freeze the water and hopefully the fish-like creature below the water.
The ‘breath’ began to flow from her hands dropping the temperature in the room and in particular freezing the water creating a covering of ice over the surface of the water and trapping the aquatic creature beneath the ice. Yet that didn’t stop its mental attacks as wave after wave of compulsion to surrender, to become the servants, the slaves of the Aboleth and bring it and its ‘guide’ (that being how it considered the other creature skittering across the surface of the ice back towards them) to this world; to enter the water and become its servants forever.
Akira tried to erect a force cage around the centipede-like creature heading back towards them, “fight hard you do, not succeed, but fight hard. Impressed Jarth is.”
Akira nodded as the cage formed round the creature, “Well we want to survive as well. Perhaps there is an accommodation we could come to where everyone survives?” It tilted its strange little head, “Ah, but die must you. For contract. Die must, to here bring…”
Trying to keep it from attacking, Akira continued, “Why would you want to be here anyway?” Again, it tilted its head and chittered, “Fun, little magic this world has. Competition limited, counter little, rule would we and fun much have. Mage petty silly book only want for freedom give. Price you.”
“so this Mage wants the book that is the prize for our death?” “Ha, though names true hide they, great power have, to leave compelled authority has it… Stay desire we. Title use we instead. Jarth of the Unspoken. Name not, mage not, Jarth not.”
Another wave of compulsion washed over the two of them, each stronger, harder to fight that the previous attack. Mary tried to break free from the grasping hands then elected to cast a spell instead to try and compel the Jarth to reveal its true name. The spell flowed and broke against its will – it chittered and then spoke, “Humm, happen not.”
Another hand grabbed her ankle tightly and began to squeeze tight.
Akira decided to try to create some confusion and quickly cast the illusions of Idolon on the Jarth, remodelling the glamour so that his image appeared inside the force cage instead. Perhaps it might make the aquatic creature attack it instead. Momentarily the compulsion lessened as the Jarth shuddered under its influence instead. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long.
Mary was not so fortunate. Another wave, this more brutal that the last, washed over her mind and then both she and Akira felt the compulsion increase. Then at its height they heard a voice come out of the thin air they immediately recognised, the oh so familiar tones of Marcus Tolliver, “Come out of it, are you there?” Where had that come from? How..? That’s when Akira realised what all the weirdness meant – this had to be a dream, nightmare really. They were trapped in a mindscape crafted by the Jarth and its aquatic companion that why the laws of physics could be so easily ruptured, they were under some sort of spell and not here in reality.
Akira tried to drop the wand, hoping by doing so it would break the spell. He couldn’t let go no matter how hard he tried. He again tried to transform it into sand in the hope it would drop from his fingers. Nothing.
The compulsion in their minds was getting stronger, harder to fight and the focus changed from serving the Aboleth instead to killing each other, to make each a sacrifice to bring the two creatures through the veil and into their dimension; their deaths bringing forth life in the form of the Jarth and the Aboleth. Their deaths will seal their transition.
Akira tried to focus in on Marcus’ voice and tried to use his astral travel to shatter the dream illusion they were trapped in, by revealing their true fate. They both knew this was not real but why had no one removed the ward from his hand back in the real world? After all Marcus had never been to the BASEment so did the fact they had heard his voice mean they were still in the park, trapped somehow? This itself was merely another illusion if he could just figure out how to breach it…?
As another, stronger wave of compulsion washed over them, he realised it was now or never; putting all his effort into a final attempt to use his magic to shatter the illusion.
He summoned the Eight Eyes of Ios and as the swirling chaos penetrated through and shattered the illusion around them, he found himself waking in the field but realised he was lying on a trolley in a decontamination tent with an airlock entrance surrounded by doctors in full all-environment contamination suits. He lay next to Banshee, both of them covered in a thick blue-grey mucus flowing from the still-grasped wand that had almost completely covered them both from head to foot. Only their faces were not yet completely covered in the secretion. This was draining their will… He was in both the BASEment being attacked and on the surface at the same time, trapped in one and paralysed in another.
He tried to confirm to Banshee back in the dreamscape what was happening and try and figure out what could break them out from this dream? What were they going to do? They had to WAKE UP!!!
They mentally struggled to force themselves to confront the reality of being actually paralysed under the secretion and the need to PHYSICALLY WAKE-UP from the nightmare. The wand dropped from Akira’s tight grip as they ripped their way out of the mindscape. Awake now but still paralysed, Banshee forced both Akira and her to turn insubstantial inside the gunk. As they did so, the mucus splashed to the ground when what was shaping the blue-grey fluid sheath, their bodies vanished. Then, before they fully rematerialized next to the trolleys, they ‘saw’ a last image sent by the Jarth, that of the masked mage who had contracted with the creatures for their slow and painful death. They also realised that the Jarth had memories of being on Earth before and desperately wanted to return permanently.
Exhausted, Banshee contacted the BASEment to confirm everything was OK before allowing the doctors to continue their prodding and poking.
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 