Jeeves smiled widely as he saw Mary and Akira step out of the airlock of Daedalus’ docked ship and into the muggy humidity and almost overwhelming heat of the Libreville spaceport in Gabon. They had a lot to catch up on in the month they had been away, though apparently it had been only a couple of weeks for them. Jeeves understood that while only 24 hours passed inside a ship when in jumpspace, several days passed back in their own dimension.Inter-dimensional time dilation if you will, which was a universal constant apparently, regardless of how many parsecs the ship crossed whilst in jumpspace it only took them 1 day while a week had passed for everyone else.
Jeeves opened the rear door to the Crate only for Mary to ignore him and immediately head for the pilot’s seat. Ah, might be a good idea to suggest that she undertook her pilot’s license test again.
oOo
It was a couple of days later when Jeeves announced they had a visitor and stepped back to reveal Inspector Tolliver standing in the doorway.
Marcus walked into the lounge. “Nice to see you both back. Not that the ‘reserve team’ didn’t do a good job in your absence of course. I won’t ask where you vanished to this time, but I understand that a certain Mr ‘Smith’, supposedly from G.R.E.E.T., is anxiously searching for you – something about vanishing refugees and staff or something? You might want to have a good story ready for him.
Anyway, I ah, understand that Paragon didn’t return with you. Are you looking to recruit again?
It’s just that I recently encountered a new arrival in Wessex that you might want to keep an eye on; goes by the moniker of X-Ray. He was previously based in Stoke-on-Trent but apparently recently moved here. You might want to look him up? I come across him when he responded to a call while the team was unavailable.
He encountered Mekha Prime, or possibly one of its mechanical clones, who were robbing one of Spartacorps old storage warehouses in the Silicon Dell district. He successfully took it as well as two hijacked mechanoid minions down before they could leave with some crates of archived computer tapes – and before you ask, yes they were old magnetic data reels, the type they used in ancient mainframes; no idea why. The damn robot managed to upload its information before it went kaboom.
Anyway, I’ve snagged the crates as evidence and sent them to the Challenger-Wildeman’s to check them out, so hopefully we’ll know what he, it, was after.
Ah, the tape tins were labelled ‘Operation Chronos’, any ideas what that was or might be? No?
Anyway, this was just a brief visit to welcome you both back, warn you about Mr ‘Smith’ and bring this new guy, X-Ray, to your attention – you’re a bit understaffed these days aren’t you? I mean I know Annie’s desperate to get back to Sam and her detective agency and as for Jeeves ..? Well, he is already overworked by you two as it is. Might be time to consider recruiting again.
Damn, things haven’t been stable for this team since my son was forced to retire, has it?”
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 