“Damn it, does nobody take a day-off anymore?” Thought Marcus as he grabbed his uniform off the clothes hanger and headed out the front door. “Still, it’s better than continuing to argue with Luke about Jerome again.” That was, he decided the only upside to his being called back into work for a third leave day in a row. “What was it about Wessex currently that all the meta-crazies were coming out to play?” He was grateful the Balance weren’t off on one of their world trips at the moment and were always willing to attend a meta-confrontation at a few minutes notice.
Twenty minutes later Marcus, now officially Inspector Tolliver as he was back in uniform, walked into the briefing room. He picked up a copy of the first contact report and put out a call for the Balance. They immediately responded. It did seem weird though that it was only Akira and either Annie or Jeeves that arrived for briefings these days. The rest of the team never attended or appeared to speak to anyone any more, including him. Weird, but since they did such a fantastic job of responding, he could live with their change in protocol.
Twenty minutes later over Wessex
The meta-thugs had either all been rounded up, or chased by The Balance into the deserted monorail station. High in the sky a black-clad figure on the back of a grav-bike was firing multiple baton bolts with Mace-accuracy at them; admittedly, had anyone checked they might have noticed that the figure looked smaller than normal somehow. If anyone had looked really closely, they’d have realised that the figure was actually a white skinned, male, elderly and using a sniper crossbow not a wrist-bow.
Jeeves brought the grav-bike round for a second fly-by, reloaded and unleashed a second cascade of bolts. He just needed to keep his distance from others until Annie figured out how to hack one of Mace’s anonymity collars to alter his imagery.
On the ground, an insubstantial Banshee drifted in silently through the door and unleashed a sonic attack.
Back in the Crate, Annie guided the holographic-disguised Tinks towards the gang, switched on the drone’s speakers and released a sonic blast. It lacked the mystical element of Banshee’s terrorising scream but when used with the drone’s disguised Taser it was very effective. Operation Holo-Ghost appeared to be working. Of course, there was always a chance their attackers might actually hit the drone disguised inside the holographic field that the image of Banshee was being projected onto, but Tinks was a small target, located in the centre of the illusion. As long as no one accidentally damaged the drone or expected ‘her’ to speak, the deception appeared to be working.
She did need to see if she could program Frankie so it could take over the drone operation in the field. If she could succeed in doing that, she could them attend with the team and provide practical support.
Behind the huddled gang, a figure surrounded in flames burst through the wall and confronted the gathered Metas with a pyro-attack. Akira had hoped originally to find the female Samantha but either she was keeping a low profile in this current point in time or was still to undergo Breakthrough.
Akira’d found Beltane working with the Caledonian Protectorate and ‘persuaded’ her to spend some time on secondment with them. Ok she looked nothing like Young Sam but when confronted by a fiery figure, no one actually asked who they were. Admittedly, Beltane was arguing that she disliked the deception and wanted to use her own identity rather than be referred to as Young Sam in the field and Akira was seriously considering allowing it. A single change in the team wasn’t going to be a media disaster.
Perhaps Akira just needed to suggest to the media that Young Sam was on a sabbatical at least until the real Balance returned?
Young Mary flew in through the roof in her illustrious armour and unleashed a blast at the remaining thugs, only their leader managed to escape. OK, not exactly duplicating the original team and yet another team change but they needed all additional firepower they could get at the moment.
Before he could think about it further, Akira was forced to raise his shield as the boss man, fleeing the assault on his gang, ran into him out back. The moron unleashed a blast of lightning, which dispersed round his shield before earthing itself in the floor. Akira responded by reaching out his hand towards the floor and converted the concrete into custard. Ok it might not be actual custard, he wasn’t sure of the correct chemical makeup of custard, but his transformation had the right consistency and was yellow. He watched, delighted as the boss man fell through the floor onto the deserted platform twenty metres below and knocked himself unconscious. The ‘custard’ on him reverting back to concrete as he dropped. Oops! Well looks like this operation was over and the collateral damage was relatively minor. Had to count this as another successful operation for Team Balance.
Time for the team to head back to the BASEment. He felt tired, perhaps, he’d dream of the team again tonight? It had been a couple of months since his last, oh-so-vivid dream about them…
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 