Superhero Adventures, UK Style

Mary threw her bag onto the bunk of her container apartment and sighed. It was good to be home. She was about to close the door when she saw Jeeves crossing the forecourt between the various altered cargo containers housing her once homeless neighbours, with a tray on which was stacked a pair of cups, saucers, a teapot and all the essential accompaniments for high tea including she was glad to see, a plate of sandwiches.

She smiled, even ‘up top’ Jeeves liked to do things proper. A couple of minutes later there was a knock at the open door and a smiling Jeeves poked his head round. “Ma’am. You had a good time in Ireland I trust?”

“Yes, thank you Edward, most entertaining and extremely informative. How have things been here?”

Jeeves put the tray down on the small magazine table in front of Mary’s old, battered sofa, pulling over a small stool he sat down and began to pour tea for both of them.

“Well, it’s been fairly quiet, possibly due to the weather. The Mask of Janus still hasn’t been found and it hasn’t appeared for sale at any of the illegal Nazareth markets here in the UK or on the continent. We’ve had some local issues with the West-X6 gang but Mace has taken it upon herself to show them the error of their ways. In between times, she has been trying to track down more information regarding her doppelgänger, Agent Sparrow, very elusive that one.

The potential gang war situation in Dragon’s Gate is currently in a hiatus possibly due to Sam and Ms Annie’s intervention. Thankfully, the death threats and attacks on local public figures in the community have ceased at least for the moment. I understand that Sam in particular seems to be focusing the investigation on the activities of Joseph Kuang, also known as Joey Tiamente and youngest son of Kuang Ma, leader of the Choy Lok On Tong. I have asked Ms Annie to let us know if she needs any assistance.

Akira is currently spending a few days at Ffrwd Dylluan investigating some disturbance in ‘the space-time continuum’ which I assume means there is yet another leak in the plumbing and he needs to try and persuade a plumber to stay long enough to fix it rather than being spooked away by the house.”

Mary picked up her cup and balanced a couple of the sandwiches on the edge of the saucer. She was about to bite into one when she was interrupted by a message over her commdot on the Trouble Alert channel. Dispatch was asking for assistance in tracking down a young male student that seemingly had been kidnapped from Claremont Academy only a few hours before.¹ The Balance were among a select few that knew that the school trained students participating in the Hero Certification Programme training scheme. Was the kidnapped victim a Meta and if so, could a certain other HCP school be responsible? Mary requested that Dispatch change over to an encrypted channel and asked for the name and meta-status of the missing boy. When she heard he was Reni Moriarty and a HCP student, well that was a name she wouldn’t soon forget. He was the young man that had uncovered Labyrinth’s involvement in the theft of the Silver Storm particles and who’d accidentally been exposed to them during their rescue from the deserted railway station.² She’d wondered what had happened to him.

Perhaps if Akira could try and track..? A quick call revealed that he would try to get back as soon as he’d sorted out or at least settled down the ‘nexus instability’ in the house and he could try to do a location spell if the school could send over a personal item belonging to the kid..? Dispatch agreed to make the request to the school and ended the conference call. Mary then tried to contact Mace but wherever she was, she was not contactable at the moment.

Then another call came in from Dispatch. Was the Balance available to back up London Watch? Attendees at the opening of an exhibition of esoteric religious artefacts were under assault at Wessex Town Hall. King Charles himself was present to open the exhibit and was now being protected by London Watch and his own security detail while under siege.

Unfortunately, this left them trapped with a few hundred other guests inside the main hall. London Watch felt they had that situation in hand however another report had come in that several of the attackers had been seen raiding one of the side exhibits, a display of relics discovered fairly recently near Angkor Wat which had belonged to a minor and apparently now extinct cult known as the Eightfold Path.

The Town Hall was about four miles from Container Town in the centre of Wessex (despite Wessex being a city with its own charter, the building continued to be known as the “Town Hall”). A sprawling Victorian Gothic of a building that as well as housing the Mayor’s parlour, Council Chambers and offices also incorporated a local museum, magistrate’s courts and even an abandoned and now repurposed Police station, complete with holding cells.

Mary quickly stuffed her sandwiches into her mouth with an apologetic look at Jeeves who seemed to be accessing her laptop and pulling something up on the screen. “I hope you don’t mind Ma’am but I’ve taken the liberty of accessing the floor plans and exhibition publicity. I would also like your permission for you to take the drone Tinks with you?”

Given she had no idea what she might encounter having a sealed recording as evidence might not be a bad thing.

She gulped down her tea and quickly memorised the floor plan Jeeves had accessed online. The exhibition of religious artefacts from around the world was on display in various locations throughout the building, from the Museum to the Great Hall, which was on the first floor, next to the Council Chamber. The Great Hall was where King Charles and London Watch were being constrained currently.

The museum was at the far end of the building – some distance from the Great Hall, if you didn’t know the building. Mary had only ever been there once before, to meet with Mayor Adam O’Connor.³

Public access to the Museum and galleries was from Blue Boar Street. The exhibition had expanded into several of the other rooms, including the old Library and assembly room on the floor above and into the old Police Station, which was located next door to the Museum beneath the Magistrates Court. Part of the station had been converted into a café and bar called the Alibi, the rest was normally used for conferences though the Galley Hall still incorporated part of the Victorian Police Station with its prison cells which had been opened up to make secure exhibition and display space. Above, a corridor led from the Great Hall down to the Judge’s Chambers, Jury room and to the Court, which was on the floor above the cells and linked by stairs and public lifts.

Looking at the floor plan, she felt her best bet was to enter the building via the Training Room next door to the Gallery. Tinks flew up the lift shaft incorporated into the far end of her container. She opened the hatch, grabbed hold of the drone, turned into Banshee and flew as fast as she could towards the city centre and the Town Hall, turning insubstantial on the way.

As she approached the Museum side of the building, she could see Armed Response and AEGIS setting up outside the building. She could see Marcus, Inspector Tolliver, organising the local response team. She didn’t stop, she just waved and flew round the side and through the window into a thankfully empty room. This part of the exhibition was showing some of the more obscure displays on loan, including a number of grotesque masks and a display or sacrificial blades. There was some noise coming from the room next door. Remaining insubstantial, she placed Tinks on top of a display cabinet whereupon it reactivated and silently flew high into the air, following and recording.

Next, Banshee stepped into the Gallery and could see six figures trying to break into one of the cells on the opposite side of the room. Inside the locked cell was a collection of stone tablets carved with a variety of mystifying symbols, many of which had a passing resemblance to spiders. A young-looking woman she immediately recognised was exposing the lock of the repurposed holding cell to intense frost. Dementia was back in the UK. Standing beside her was a woman in a dark armoured costume with a pair of sword hilts showing above her shoulders while the other four figures were armed with assault weapons, Kalashnikov’s she thought and wearing dark body armour. The three lenses on their helmets made them seem even more sinister.

One of them pointed at her and said something in a language Banshee didn’t recognise but was reasonably sure would be Carpathian. A second later, the auburn-haired woman turned to look at her and smirked

“Salut Matusa, or should I say hello Aunt…”

Banshee responded with a groan and a roll of her eyes. “Can you not be satisfied with the life y’have, gran’ niece, Must you always be trying to take things from other people?”

Suddenly the room erupted as two of her guards let loose with automatic fire in Banshee’s direction. Thankfully, since she was still insubstantial that meant the bullets peppered the wall behind her. The sound of gunfire would have alerted the Officers outside and that meant the room would be filled with armed response in the next few minutes. She needed to disarm them and quickly before anyone got hurt.

In front of her, the frozen lock shattered and the girl rushed into the cell and immediately grabbed one of the stone carvings, a large stone tablet decorated with a horrific looking spider pattern.

Banshee immediately unleashed a wail, which surprisingly had almost no effect on the guards standing between Dementia and her.

Dementia responded by gesturing at Banshee. A wave of intense, mind-numbing cold swept over her and for the next few seconds she found herself despairing and wondering why she was there, then all hell broke loose.

From the corridor, a group of small Vietnamese-looking males in tailored suits rushed into the room. There was a family resemblance in that they all had similar facial looks; grey eyes, an unusual reddish tinge to their skin and each apparently had black spider tattoos on the back of their wrists. One of them tried to attack her and to his surprise, he passed through her and collapsed in a heap on the ground showing a mouthful of sharp, shark-like teeth. Whoever they were, they seemed to be determined to get their hands on the same stone tablet, but was it to protect it or?

As the men with Dementia started to fire at the intruders, they muttered something that sounded like “Uttu-Raknis” as they collapsed to the ground in front of them and started to vomit except, instead of puke or bile they were spewing up hundreds of living spiders. Wave after wave of arachnids, of all sizes and types, discharged from their mouths, which immediately swarmed over the soldiers and began to bite them. The room filled with screams as the soldiers collapsed, their AK47’s still firing randomly. The spiders were obviously extremely poisonous.

Still flying and despite being still insubstantial, Banshee tried to veer and swerve in three dimensions round the gunfire while heading towards the tablet at full speed.  Her aim was to reach the artefact, turn substantial, grab the artefact, turn insubstantial again and make a rapid departure through the wall.

Unfortunately, Dementia and her female companion were already in the cell and as the spiders swarmed over their guards, the other female gestured and the shadows in the cell flowed together. They stepped through the gathered darkness with the carving. The sulphur and liquoricey stench from the portal seemed to hold the spiders at bay for the moment until it closed leaving the afterimage of a jackal-like head temporarily burnt onto Banshee’s retina.

She did manage to see Tinks fly through after them just before the passageway closed.  Was Jeeves remote piloting or had Annie upgraded its auto-programming? As soon as they vanished, the Asian attackers immediately turned, ignoring Banshee and ran out of the room. What had just happened?

Before she could follow them, the room started to fill with armed police officers and she was forced to give up her plans of pursuit while she stunned and killd the horde of spiders with shattering shrieks before they could swarm the ‘fresh meat’. The Police officers size 12 boots did the rest as they stamped and smashed as many of the surviving spiders as they could. Only those that scurried up the walls, into corners or under display cabinets survived.

The next half hour as Armed Response and AEGIS swarmed over the Town Hall, several things became apparent. The Vietnamese (or should that be Cambodians given the artefacts of the Eightfold Way had been discovered near Ankor Wat?) had vanished and no trace of them could be found.

Fumigators had to be called in urgently to deal with the remaining poisonous spiders that had survived the double assault and had taken up occupancy in the Gallery before the bodies could be examined.

Other than the four thieves killed by the spiders, no one else had been injured thankfully though Banshee found it interesting that the attackers upstairs had teleported away at approximately the same time as Dementia once they were no longer needed. In their case, they had been transported by a young male in a ball of light but still leaving a distinct smell of sulphur and myrrh behind.

Inspector Tolliver was able to confirm as soon as King Charles was whisked away that the four dead had travelled to Britain likely on fake Russian passports having literally arrived in the country earlier that same day.

Later, Banshee placed a call to Jeeves who confirmed that Tink’s signal had temporarily vanished only to reappear a second later in London. It was some time later before he was able to confirm that the drone’s last signal had originated from within the Carpathian Embassy before the signal had died. Had Tinks been discovered or had it just ran out of power?

All attempts to locate Caitlin MacCarty, also known admittedly unofficially as Dementia, seemed to show that she had spent the whole day at the Carpathian Embassy in London and has not left the building at all since arriving the night before. She refused to be interviewed and the fact that she had full diplomatic immunity meant that without solid evidence, more solid than Banshee’s testimony anyway especially given the Balance’s previous interaction with her and the fact that Carpathia had declared them terrorists, she could not be questioned.

Embassy staff had revealed that she planned to fly out the next day by private charter. Mary had to wonder if the sudden disappearance of a young man with spider-like powers might be connected with the theft of an artefact that might, just might, also be spider-related. As Young Sam knew oh too well, Dementia was connected with the Seminarium Sinister of Setekh and they had managed to enhance Sam’s meta-abilities using a mystical ritual and merge a storm elemental with another young Meta to create Calypso. Could this be another attempt to weaponise one more young Meta, in this case Reni Moriarty?

Banshee quickly gave her statement and proceeded to leave. Mace was still not picking up and while Akira was willing to drop everything, he was a couple of hours away unless Banshee collected him in the Crate. It would take too long she decided as she flew back, collected the craft and set off for a park close to the Carpathian Embassy. Once she arrived, she ‘parked’ the craft 30 metres in the sky and decamped as Banshee. Insubstantial and invisible she flew towards the Embassy building.

“This was where things get difficult,” she thought. Contrary to popular belief, most diplomatic missions did not enjoy full extraterritorial status and were not in reality sovereign territory of the represented state. Rather, the premises of diplomatic missions remained under the jurisdiction of the host country while being afforded special privileges (such as immunity from most local laws) by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

In other words, British law still applied once she stepped inside the Embassy. However, diplomats themselves retained their full diplomatic immunity, and the host country could not enter the premises of the mission without permission of the represented country, even to put out a fire. International rules designated an attack on an embassy as an attack on the country it represented. In other words what she was about to do could technically be considered an act of war.

On the other hand, she could just end up being arrested for burglary.  Burglary was defined as the unlawful entry into almost any structure (not just a home or business) with the intent to commit any crime inside. Physical breaking and entering was not a requirement; the offender could simply trespass through an open door or in her case by phasing in through the walls and it would then be for her to try to prove her intent wasn’t criminal.

In other words, no matter what she did, she was screwed. She needed to get in there and try to find the stone tablet. She was sure no good would come of them having possession of it. There was also the possibility that the Moriarty boy was being kept captive in there as well.

In front of her and seemingly unguarded, from the outside at least, was a spectacular four storey Georgian mansion, no doubt built using a fortune made off the back of slavery. It was now leased (no one in their right mind would sell such a property in Belgravia) to Carpathia.

Her plan was simple. She planned to enter the building via a waiting room on the ground floor next to the Janissary’s (what they apparently called their Ambassador) public meeting room. Once inside and while still hidden by the curtains, she needed to not be Banshee anymore (unless she had no other choice) or for that matter Mother Weirdigan, as both were known but she did have an alternative.

Looking through the window, she confirmed that the room was unoccupied and could see through the doorway opposite into the entrance hall beyond, where there was a large marble desk with its staff of one. The receptionist, a very pretty, young woman was trying to deal with a small group of visitors that looked very familiar. None were taller than about five foot three inches with a now familiar reddish tinge to their skin. It was the same Vietnamese or Cambodians that had attacked Dementia at the museum. They were standing round a tall, slender woman with the poise of a super model. She had long, flowing black hair, was easily six foot tall, wearing a classic black Prada dress. Then the corridor door blew shut. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Banshee phased through the wall and window to stand behind the curtains. She hoped she was hidden from any co+ncealed CCTV cameras that might be in the room as she changed back into Mary. She immediately called down the Fae glamour granted her by the Dormouse at the tea party in the park ⁴ to change her appearance into the younger-looking version of herself, admittedly still with white hair. The younger Mary had rarely been seen and thankfully had no public identity.

She tried to use her mystic senses to try to get a fix on where the stolen tablet might be and instantly felt overwhelmed. There was definitely some bad juju going on in the floor above at the far end of the building. Funny, she’d assumed that they would have set up in the basement but there was something about her vision that made her think the room might be a gymnasium on the floor above. There was a strong psychic ‘scent’ that she associated with fear, blood, and at least one person was afraid for their life. She just had to figure out how to get upstairs while avoiding embassy staff. Perhaps if she went through the meeting room next door then she should reach one of the staircases?

Rather than risk being seen, she took out her harp and began to weave an illusion that she wasn’t there. It wasn’t invisibility as such so much as an attempt to not be seen, merging her illusion in with the background of the room and blanketing any sound she might make. She had to risk opening the interconnecting door between the two rooms first though. Just before she did there was the sound of screaming and shots being fired from the other side of the building. Seems the visitors she had seen were not receiving a cordial welcome.

She rushed in, harp ready and found the room empty. Still playing the harp, she headed to the other door and found herself in a corridor next to the staircase. She watched several guards in black military uniform rush by, oblivious to her presence amongst them. She sidestepped them even as more gunfire could be heard still coming from the other end of the building. Mary turned and got to the top of the stairs when a soldier ran into her trying to get to the action. “Scuzati-ma” he muttered automatically as he almost knocked her back down the stairs. Unable to continue playing, young Mary visually manifested as the young soldier, eyes wide asked her, “Cine ești tu?” She immediately changed tune into playing the Daur da Bláo lullaby tune and was rewarded with his collapsing asleep at her feet. She pushed his unconscious body safely away from the stairs and resumed her illusion as she headed towards the miasma of psychic darkness billowing towards her. Thankfully, the rest of the journey was relatively uneventful, as everyone else seemed to be heading towards the ‘disturbance’, which appeared to be going to the same place she was. She was forced to scamper to one side as armed soldiers with the now familiar three lenses on their helmets rushed passed though the majority seemed to be using the stairs at the other side of the building rather than passing her.

Then she saw it, through the glass petition that surrounded the stairwell, a giant spider with a human female torso, head and long flowing locks was feasting on the bodies of several soldiers and appeared immune to the bullets being fired up the stairs at it. Not only did she appear now to have an excessive number of limbs, they definitely no longer resembled the legs of the woman she’d seen in Reception.

The door frame into the room beyond was frozen solid and there was a young male voice bellowing from inside the room, “There is no fucking way you are turning me into that!”

Up close, Mary could clearly see that the abomination was an unholy amalgamation of arachnid and woman, though with four humanoid arms and eight spider-like legs, her mouth covered in blood and gore from her victims. Rather than face it, at least not yet, Mary dived into the room next door to the corner room. It was thankfully empty and obviously some sort of media or communications office, the interior walls covered in several monitors all connected to video editing suites. To his surprise sitting on the desk partially dismantled, was Tinks their faithful little drone. The security seal on the recording chips thankfully hadn’t been breached yet. She could hear the intense sound of fighting coming from the corner room next door and considered just grabbing the dismantled parts and phasing through the wall but then had an idea.

Relying on this being one of the few rooms in the Embassy to be unmonitored (after all they apparently scrutinised all the CCTV cameras in the building from here so who would watch – and record – the watchers but themselves?) she stopped playing to allow her to examine the components. She was after all still in her youthful glamour.

Adam had insisted that all of the team had to know the basics of repairing and maintaining Tinks in the field and Mary’s own innate tendency to tinker came to the fore. It took her about a minute to reassemble the component parts and another couple to set the camera to record her in her glamour and store it on the projector’s own drive before making sure Tink’s concealed Taser could be controlled by her using her commdot if Frankie was unable to re-establish remote control.

More shooting, again from the stairwell, followed a few seconds later by the sound of something or someone trying to rip a door free of its frame. It was time to move.

Mary transformed back into Banshee turning both insubstantial and invisible, slipped through the internal partition wall while holding Tinks and was rewarded by finding that she emerged in the Gym she’d psychically ‘experienced’ earlier. Off to one side the iced-up door was splintering under an onslaught of intense, focused violence.

Inside the Gym were the six Cambodians from Reception viciously attacking the same number of soldiers who were struggling to wrestle with them. Behind them, stood Dementia trying to connect the stone tablet using an unholy array of cables to mystical markings on the floor and walls and some sort of monitoring or amplification equipment and then to a familiar near-naked young male fastened by shackles to an upright X frame; his body painted in myriad occult symbols. He was screaming with rage.

Invisible, Mary took everything in as she stayed with her back close to the wall, hopefully unseen and unheard by the warring protagonists.  She released Tinks and was rewarded with seeing the drone float up towards the ceiling and away from her, back under Frankie’s control once more.

The other thing she saw was that the centre of the room had been cleared of equipment and a large circular mystical sigil next to a giant jackal head symbol of Setekh had been painted in a dark brown fluid, dried blood she was sure; a sigil that radiated the darkest of magical energies… It was connected to a machine located beneath a transparent fluid-filled cylinder that seems to contain a pulsating human brain…

When they had raided that warehouse in Carpathia, there had been a similar pattern painted in blood on the floor, which Akira had thought was part of a mystical teleportation network though admittedly they had failed to see a cylinder containing a brain while there.

Unexpectedly three of the unarmed soldiers collapsed screaming as spiders began to erupt from their flesh before reburrowing back under their skin again. The screaming stopped suddenly as the poison from the spider bites coursed through their veins. Dementia responded by blasting her own fallen men in wave after wave of intense cold even as she tried to activate the unholy contraptions surrounding the boy Reni.

Banshee needed an element of surprise if she was to deal with Dementia, rescue the boy and deal with the others, never mind the Spider-Queen outside.

From the far corner of the room, a young white haired woman appeared as though teleporting in, as Frankie activated Tinks to project an image of Young Mary standing in front of the window. The image she’d recorded only a few seconds before was now running on a loop as Frankie moved the image around, arm outstretched towards the fighting. At the same time, Banshee unleashed a shattering shriek from her own concealed location broadly aimed at the technology rigged-up around the boy.

She was rewarded with the control console going up in smoke. Unfortunately, the boys’ shackles were still in place. Dementia muttered something that sounded like “Matusa?” and fired of a couple of blasts of arctic frost at the projection. It hit the wall behind the image but missed the drone and thankfully, the blasts were nowhere near Banshee herself.

Frankie activated Tink’s ‘sonic scream’ as cover, while it tasered two of the Asian males and rendered them unconscious. Pity it was only equipped with a laser-guided taser and not an industrial laser, as she could have done with it ‘liberating’ the prisoner.

Mayhem ensued as both Carpathian Guards and Asian attackers attacked the holographic illusion, which immediately vanished. With the holo-projector switched off, Frankie glided the miniature drone to another location in the room as covertly as she could while Banshee also changed her own location. As soon as she had relocated closer to the door she let loose with a wail of the Banshee even as one of the Asian attackers must have figured out the source of the attack and rushed at and through her only to smash into the wall behind, knocking himself unconscious.

Dementia started to create an ice wall in front of her and the boy as well as sending an ice spear into the heart of one of the attackers, even as she screamed, “Matusa, I know you’re here with your little protégé there. Teleporter is she? I have several of them too. I wonder how she would cope against someone with similar powers..? Come out come out, wherever you are…”

Banshee responded by uttering another shattering shriek and this time was rewarded with the ice wall shattering and Reni’s left hand breaking free of its crucifixion frame even as Dementia was kept distracted as Tinks moved the “Mary” image rapidly around room, switching the projection on and off if she was teleporting. It made for a distracting moving target.

Then the door splintered as the half-woman, half-monster spider pushed through the hole and began firing spurts of webbing at the remaining Carpathian soldiers causing them to be knocked across the room and binding them against the wall in silk cocoons.

Suddenly a boy and the girl she’d seen earlier at the museum, seemingly twins going by their similar physical appearance, appeared out of nowhere close to the centre of the room. They were holding hands and both gestured together as another torrent of webbing was discharged their way. A circular maelstrom of shadow and light appeared in front of them and absorbed the webbing spray only for another whirlpool of light and darkness to appear above the Cambodians and the webbing cascade down on top of them, sealing them in place.

Reni used the distraction to manifest nanite darts from his freed wrist to sever the bonds on his ankles before severing the restraint of his other wrist and collapsing to the floor just behind Dementia. She went to blast him into an icy death only to feel a blast from the Tink’s taser hit her with a glancing blow from behind, allowing Reni to leap clear. He found himself standing a mere metre in front of the advancing spider-female. Tinks tried to distract her by using its hologram to ‘teleport’ in between them and unleashing a taser shot. The half-human creature reared up on its back legs and tried to rip at the image of young Mary only for her four arms to fail to grab hold of anything physical and pass right through the seemingly intangible body.

Behind her there were several continuous bursts of gunfire as two more of Dementia’s soldiers arrived outside the room and fired at the monster advancing on their mistress. It seemed to have little if any effect on the creature.

Banshee tried to unleash a shattering shriek at the twins in the middle of the room only for them to manifest a portal in front of them. Her cry was absorbed only to reappear behind Tinks and the full onslaught of the scream rendered the holographic projector, through thankfully not its flight mechanisms, inoperable. Now visible, Dementia let out a cry of joy and took down the tiny drone in an icy blast that caused it to crash into the ground, iced up even as she screamed, “So Aunt, you risked invading the Embassy of another Country, and for what? To rescue the child and steal back the summoning stone or is it to banish the Kokyang-Wuti possessed female, avatar of Raknis there back to the Eightfold Web? Come now Aunt, do not tell me that the cat has finally got your tongue as they say in this god-forsaken country.”

Dementia was convinced she’d figured out what was going on, that she really had figured out the current state of play so it was time to mess with her head a little. Still invisible and insubstantial, Banshee allowed herself to ‘materialise’ on the other side of the room from the crashed Tinks by changing back into Mary but of course, the youthful glamour was still upon her.

‘Young’ Mary immediately readied her harp while hoping that a little misdirection might go a long way. Tinks was damaged while apparently projecting an image of a young female her, what would she make of that same person appearing in the room some distance from the crash site? Would she think this was another hologram projected by a second drone, or had she always been fighting a teleporter?

Before her fingers strummed the strings she called out, “Who are you calling Auntie, you old crone? You’re old enough to be my mother!”

Then, in keeping with the mood, she unleashed the dancing tune of Joy while calling out, “Kid!  Stop messing with the spider-lady and mess with that bloody portal-kit instead,” hoping that he would get her drift. The aim was to try to keep Dementia off-guard whilst she multi-tasked a little and prepared to unleash the ‘canntarechd’ or cantrip spell she knew as the ‘Hand of Nuada’ on her chilly pseudo-relation.

Over at the other end of the room, steam was billowing off the miniature drone as Frankie used its taser and its laser guidance system to thaw itself out of its icy prison.

As the music started to influence the others in the room, feet began to twitch and bodies swayed uncontrollably. Dementia was caught completely unprepared; she had been ready for the shrieks and screams of the Banshee but not magic.

Mary suddenly stopped playing and gestured towards Dementia, her fingers spread wide muttering all the time. Five blue sparks erupted from her fingertips followed by a ball of icy-blue fire that, if you squinted just so, might resemble a fiery fist. It immediately targeted Dementia’s aura.

The bolts of blue flame smashed through Dementia’s icy shield and slammed into her, encasing her in blue flames that radiated intense heat. Not sure how much damage the ethereal flames would actually do to the ice Queen but it definitely distracted her.

Meanwhile Reni leapt away from the spider-woman towards the bloody symbol on the floor, skidding across its lines in the hope to smearing them and kicking out at the connected apparatus but avoiding the cylinder containing the apparently still living brain.  He succeeded in pulling a number of cables loose but it took only a few seconds before Reni had to dodge the spidery chimera’s attempts to grab him. He went to pull free another cable and a portal from the teleport ‘twins’ appeared in front of his outstretched hand. He yanked it back quickly as the portal closed a second later, severing in half a loose cable that had been pulled towards it when it had first manifested. That could have been his arm!

Uncharacteristically he resisted the temptation to make with the wise cracks and focused instead on surviving for a few more minutes at least.

Before he could do anything else, a pair of sharp, spear-like feet came down on top of him, one of which tore into his shoulder. He screamed, but still rolled away and tried to restrain the creature by firing his webbing at her legs even as he ran up the wall and somersaulted over her carapace. He rolled behind her and pulled the webbing tight in an attempt to cause the creature to topple only to witness a pair of Kalashnikov’s being levelled at his bare chest.

To his surprise, instead of being shot the next thing he heard was a sizzling sound followed immediately by both soldiers falling hard to the ground, convulsing. He pulled hard on the webbing causing the spider-lady to stumble as he risked turning round and saw a small remote controlled drone zoom passed heading towards the stone tablet.

Tinks had successfully thawed itself out and was now after Dementia. Its holo-projector was apparently inoperable but its taser was obviously still fully functional.

On the opposite side of the room the young white haired female seemed surprised as she gestured with her hands and what looked like a couple of crystal shards materialised in mid-air heading towards the two teleporters. Both missiles were blocked by one of their portals but this time they didn’t rematerialise anywhere inside the room. Now those splinters definitely looked more formidable than his nanite darts though Reni.

Mary smiled. She knew her hell encounter had changed her but she hadn’t expected that. She’d hoped to bluff the twins into thinking she could manifest the Hand of Nuada again against them only for these crystal spears to materialise. She tried again and was rewarded with another shard that this time hit the floor to one side of the girl, missing her by mere centimetres.

On the other side of the room, Dementia was busy trying to refreeze the little drone as it buzzed around her before it successfully tasered her and caused her to collapse in a seizure to the ground. Mary smiled, “He might be a little machine but he has a big grudge,” she muttered under her breath.

By the door, Reni was still trying to think what to do next when from behind him Reni heard groans and risked looking down. The two guards were slowly getting back on their feet and they were still armed. He fired one of his darts into the barrel of one of the rifles but was forced to run and jump away as the other took aim and unleashed the rest of his magazine in his general direction. Thankfully, he was still suffering from the effects of being tasered and the bullets went wide of the mark.

The other soldier took aim and… His rifle blew up, the bullets exploding on making contact with Reni’s dart wedged deep inside the barrel. No time for sympathy or regret for the soldier he’d accidentally injured, he had a wild idea and swung over the spider avatar towards the two teleporters hoping to get them to try to attack him.

Mary had shifted her attentions from Dementia to target the spider-woman, using the Daur da Bláo inspired Dancing Joy tune to get her legs, all eight of them, moving uncontrollably. She glanced over and saw the boy heading towards the floor markings. Hoping he would destroy the markings or the control systems and hopefully depower the teleport twins, she was confused when she saw that he was actually reattaching several cables connecting the pattern on the ground with the brain canister. His attention distracted, the two teleporters moved in even as the spider sensed his apparent vulnerability and pounced.

The cables reattached, Reni fired a thread of webbing onto the roof at the last minute and swung clear even as the teleporters manifested a portal where he’d been a second before. It somehow interacted with and energised the sigil on the ground causing some sort of teleportal overload, either magnifying or at least disrupting the portal.

Reni couldn’t help notice that the brain in the cylinder was shuddering, as though laughing, almost as it was capable of feeling emotions. Reni didn’t wait to see what would happen. He’d figured, ok hoped, that the set up wasn’t powering up the teleporters so much as acting as some form of amplifier and if so what if its power was turned up to 11…?

The unstable portal expanded and the two teleporters found themselves pulled into the maelstrom against their will, screaming as they both vanished from sight.

Reni smiled as he realised that the spider hybrid was also being dragged into the abyss though it managed to pull free at the last second, but not before losing one of its legs to the portal as it flickered out of existence with the strong stench of sulphur and myrrh. It responded by shattering the cylinder, causing the brain inside to cascade across the floor and die.

Meanwhile the webbing holding the Cambodians and soldiers was getting brittle and those that had been webbed were starting to break free. Dementia was once again swiping at the mechanical, terrorising drone with blasts of ice as it buzzed her head. One of the blasts hit and Tinks crashed to the ground close to Mary, once more iced up but it gave Reni a chance to swing close and web the stone carving swinging it loose of its mounting brackets. Dementia tried to grab it as it swung passed but failed as it built up speed and swung into the avatar’s legs then round Reni causing the Cambodians breaking free to have to dodge as it swung back round heading towards the spider-lady’s head.

It hit, and shattered. Mary immediately rushed in and grabbed a couple of fragments before firing more of her mysterious shards at the escaping worshippers, intending to wound but not kill. The shards shattered into their knees even as Reni rushed towards Mary, grabbing the frozen drone as he did. There was no way they could escape the room so it was time for one last stand. He swirled the remaining fragments to hit at the avatars’ chest once more and missed. The creature was shrinking, shrivelling up as it once more became human before their eyes.

The once-avatar was laying there, her body wasted by the transformation, looking extremely anorexic as though the metamorphosis had eaten her up from the inside. She was still alive but unconscious and seriously ill.

Instead of thumping the Spider Queen, Reni swung the remaining fragments round his head one last time like a hammer throw and released his webbing. The fragments smashed through one of the windows to land outside on the lawn in front of the Police officers that had gathered around the building in response to the report of shots being fired.

Mary shouted out “time to teleport out of here!” Holding the fragments, she grabbed hold of Reni and winked. She immediately turned back into Banshee and rendered herself, Reni and the remaining fragments both insubstantial and invisible. She headed with her ‘cargo’ towards the outside wall and walked through before flying back towards the Crate. This was one time she was not going to go and liaise with the authorities. Behind her, a re-thawed Tinks exited by flying out through the broken window and made its own way towards the craft.

They left the spider worshippers and their now emaciated avatar reverting to human to their fate either at the hand of the Carpathians or to make their own escape. In line with diplomatic protocol the Police were holding the line around the building while they waited for someone from the Foreign Office to arrive and officially register their dismay at the events, whatever they might be, since no one outside of the Embassy really knew what was going on.

Having arrived back at the Crate (and ignoring the spectators pointing the hovering vehicle out to their kids) Banshee headed inside with her passenger and changed back to her young Mary persona.

She took the Crate up to two hundred metres and parked it once more in hover mode. Then she handed Reni an emergency blanket and checked the wound on his shoulder, which was thankfully not serious. After patching him up, she sat him down and explained, “Look, I’m going to hand in the drones witness tapes to the Police in Wessex, but first I’m going to fly you back to the school.”

Reni gratefully wrapped the blanket round him and asked, “So who are you? That crazy eyed bitch called you aunt but well you’re young and your powers; some of them are like the Balance’s Banshee but she’s the oldest superhero on the planet and scary looking to boot, you can’t be her surely?”

As he paused, his thoughts confused, Mary smiled and patted him on the shoulder, “You could say Banshee is a close relation of mine, very close but beyond that I don’t want to be identified. This was a covert operation and I’d like try and keep it that way. I’ll explain the basics to the school but you must promise me that you will not reveal my part in your resc.. eh, escape to anyone else. Ok?”

As she was about to set off for Claremont Academy to return Reni, she received a call from Akira, “The school has sent me one of the boy’s favourite jackets and I can confirm he is in London, in Belgravia to be precise. If you want I’ll get there as fast as I can and I can help you search for him?” Mary just smiled.

A Few Days After

Tink’s sealed records of the robbery was proof positive that Carpathia had committed serious crimes in the UK and showed them teleporting back to the Embassy’s gym before the recording ended abruptly. It hadn’t recorded anything after it was reactivated, however, the stone fragments that landed on the lawn backed up the recording and resulted in a major diplomatic incident even though officially no one really knew what had happened inside the Embassy itself.

She didn’t find out what had happened to the woman that had been altered or her entourage after she and the kid had escaped but she was glad to discover that Dementia was subsequently declared persona non grata and had been told to leave the UK and not return.

Although The Embassy claimed that the British Government, through its agent Banshee, had trespassed without permission and had assaulted their staff, they were unable to provide any evidence to back up their accusations and the claim was subsequently dismissed though Marcus did ask Mary in confidence what had really happened.

Of course, it was to be expected that the Carpathian Government would expel some of the UK embassy staff in retaliation but that was just part of the Great Game in play…

1. See Bluebook – Along Came a Spider
2. See Episode 8 – London’s Calling 
3. See Episode 56 – Hate is a Four-Letter Word
4. See Episode 10 – The Time has come the Walrus said