Christmas Special
Since the Balance had returned from the Fijian island of Nuku with Magma, Singularity had been acting up. It was mostly due to a personality clash with the new arrival coupled with the youth’s own feelings of insecurity caused by Magma flirting with Seven, despite the age difference – Magma was in his late 20’s and Seven only 17 – the ‘attraction’ was not reciprocated and Magma had clearly mistaken Sevens’ natural kindness as interest in him.
To add to the tension, Jeffery O’Neill, AKA Magma, had tried to sneak out most evenings – to gamble and get drunk. Akira had tried to distract him by taking him to play snooker but the diversion didn’t work and Jeffery continued to try to sneak away. In the end, the team decided to set a watch on him whenever he was up top using Mikey’s mechanised guard dogs. It was Hercules the security ‘dog’ that almost witnessed Jeffery’s departure as he was having a walk in the junkyard a few days before Christmas. It recorded him trying to sneak around a scrapped old van in the yard only to vanish in a burst of light.
Had this been a kidnapping or a pre-arranged escape? A search of his room discovered that his computer history had been completely sanitised earlier that evening and the burnt remains of a mobile phone the team hadn’t known he had were found in the waste bin of his room.
Frankie did report that Meta youths have started to go missing, presumed kidnapped, all across Europe, mostly targeting unregistered youths though, not usually adults like Magma. There had even been some kidnappings from secure M.E.T.A. facilities; where all of their security cameras had been remotely disabled just prior to the youths vanishing.
Akira elected to view the past and ‘saw’ a familiar figure standing by a portal and a seemingly willing Jeffery stepping through it. The other figure was wearing the Krampus suit previously seen a few Christmas’s before. Did that mean that its wearer had escaped from his Prison cell in Germany?
Frankie checked only to confirm that the man who’d previously used the Krampus identity, Oskar Weihnachten, was still in the Berlin Prison though currently he was on a hunger strike and refusing to speak with anyone, including the doctors.
They assumed that someone else was using his Krampus suit and technology and decided, after some debate to fly to Berlin and break in to the prison to question him.
Having sneaked inside while the whole team was invisible and insubstantial, Akira decided to do his impersonation of Christmas Past. He materialised inside the cell, monologued in full Dickensian style about being the Spirit of Christmas Past and that Oskar would be visited by two more spectres – Christmas Present (X-Ray) and Christmas Future (Banshee) if he didn’t repent and tell them who was using his technology and identity. To Akira’s disappointment Oskar remained unresponsive to his presence, with his face to the wall, ignoring him.
X-Ray ‘materialised’ next and discovered that the figure in the cell was actually a hard light hologram being projected by a holo bee – they took the miniaturised holo-projector and fled the cell in stealth mode leaving the cell empty and its occupant seemingly having just escaped from his locked cell.
Back in Wessex, they found clues that lead them to believe that the holo-projector had actually originated in the People’s Republic of China.
Frankie reminded them that China claimed that the only meta’s in their population were part of their Dragon Force and none of their operatives were considered famous in their own right due to the fact that no individual member was around for more than 18 months before being replaced. There was never any record of their retiring or returning to civilian life after that period and many of their replacements on the teams had identical or similar powers to the person they’d replaced.
In China, anyone who was discovered to be a Meta and refused to join up disappeared never to return as did their families. Shortly after another person would appear as a member of their Government-sponsored Dragon Force with identical powers but they too will disappear from the public eye after about 12 – 18 months never to be seen again.
It was rumoured that the Chinese government had an ongoing purge against all those with meta abilities and only those who serve the state as part of their Dragon Force were publicly acknowledged, whether all other Chinese metas were imprisoned or executed was unknown.
The still missing 13 blue-eyed African children were also heading to China, to Hong Kong to be precise. The team considered heading to Hong Kong but before they could agree what to do when they got there, they received a transmission from Agent Wallace who wanted their assistance again.
The M.E.T.A. agency has allocated Agent Wallace to oversee the safety of several teenage Meta detainees from the Wessex facility to a safe location somewhere. He had decided to transport the captured, previously unregistered metas to Rannoch Prison as a temporary measure and asked the team to come along as additional security.
They reluctantly agreed. X-Ray and Banshee flew overhead while Akira disguised himself as a teenage girl using the Illusions of Idolon and travelled in the rear transport as another detainee. He recognised the male Washout and the female they’d rescued from Russia, Medusa the Stormer who they had brought to London Below. She must have gone outside and been captured. The remaining prisoner with Akira was a young male wearing a gag. They were all wearing meta-dampener collars. The other transport had a further four young detainees.
AS they travelled up the Motorway towards Scotland, Banshee and X-Ray (who were flying above the two vans), noticed that a large articulated lorry had been staying in front of the two transports for the last few miles, every time one of the transports pulled out to pass so did the lorry. X-Ray elected to check it out and his enhanced senses revealed that the rear of the truck was completely empty. He then checked out the cabin and discovered that it too was empty, there was no driver and to his surprise discovered that there was no remote control fitted either. That’s when he realised that the van in from of the lorry had also been manoeuvring in an identical pattern to the lorry, moving across lanes whenever one of the M.E.T.A. transports had tried to pass the lorry.
Banshee checked out the occupants of the van and discovered it had four occupants, two men both dressed all in black, one middle-aged holding a bird-headed cane and a much younger driver and two females she immediately recognised – Death Metal and with her Lady Door from the London Below Sanctuary.
Death Metal gestured and the lorry behind them jack-knifed across all of the Northbound lanes and then tumbled onto its side acting as a barricade, forcing the two transports to brake and come to a sudden stop. A minibus that had almost been tailgating the rear transport for the last couple of miles also screeched to a halt and ten armed men exited with the Krampus.
X-Ray moved the lorry Gravi-kinetically off the road and onto the embankment but the older man was already out of the van and has slammed a small container onto the drivers’ door of the first M.E.T.A. transport. A device fitted to the top of the canister drilled through the door and released knockout gas into the cab before hobbling to the next with a second canister even as the younger male started to grow in size until he stood 15 feet high.
Death Metal exited the van and gestured at the rear doors of the first transport and they immediately sprung open under her magnetic powers. She looked up and seeing X-Ray smiled. “Are you my Christmas gift – a replacement for tall, dark and brooding? Is Paragon still away? Pity I had a gorgeous gift for him, Me! But it looks like I will have to give it to you instead, boyfriend..!” she shouted up as she magnetically pulled the two guards towards her.
That was when X-Ray realised that the Christmas tinsel wrapped around her body was intertwined around cheese wire and could be used to hurt or even kill the guards. Unwilling to chance it, X-Ray decided to take her out of the game while Lady Door started to portal the four meta youths in the front transport away.
The now gigantic youth rushed to the rear transport and interjected himself between the man with the cane and the Krampus and his men.
Having dealt with a possibly psychotic Death Metal and unsure what he should do about the youths being teleported away from the attackers by someone that Banshee said could be trusted he joined the other two in fighting Krampus and his minions who were attacking the rear transport. He heard the one Banshee called Lady Door say that the others were part of an underground railway rescuing metas that hadn’t committed any crimes other than being unregistered.
Meanwhile the older man knocked one of the guards’ unconscious before reaching down and switching off the transportees power dampeners. As soon as the collars deactivated Washout started to dehydrate the two guards that had been escorting them only for Akira to stop him with a blast.
Krampus’ minions start shooting wildly so Akira multi-attacked them back. Banshee unleashed a fearful scream that caused a couple to flee and soon they are all unconscious even as Krampus tries to escape, only for X-Ray to blast him unconscious. With all of the M.E.T.A. personnel comatose, they secured Krampus and his men but elected to allow the prisoners to escape through the portal given that, with the exception of Washout, they have committed no serious crimes.
They decided that when questioned they would state that the teens had escaped and they had left in pursuit but failed to recapture them.
They stepped through Lady Door’s portal and appeared in what seemed to have once been some sort of underground engineering site with platforms on several levels left over possibly from when a massive turbine had been removed decades before.
Dozens of people mostly dressed in warm cloaks and hoods and wearing surgical facemasks meandered around – this was obviously some form of marketplace rather than just a shelter. Several mutated and altered people could clearly be seen moving around in the crowds.
Then Frankie’s voice came over their Comms, <<Designation: The Balance, according to your ‘Stable door’ Protocol trackers the team has been transported to Camden in North London and you are currently underground. Can I assume you have been transported to London Below?>>
As he looked around, X-Ray realised that this place has a series of permanent teleportational portals acting like doors or gateways to other locations across London.
Lady Door assured them that all of the youths would be kept safe down there, even Washout provided he broke no more laws and she offered to send the team anywhere they wanted to go. Akira stated they needed to head to Hong Kong next and to his surprise discovered that Lady Door could open a portal to the Hong Kong Hideaway, which was a sanctuary similar to London’s – open to anyone who needs to disappear from the surface world.
They arrived in Hong King in an old underground storm tunnel with lots of sewage pipes crisscrossing the roof and walls, an elderly gentleman was helped over by two near identical youths to meet them. He explained that he was the master of this sanctuary and offered to arrange for them to go wherever they wanted to go.
They asked to go to the harbour where the container ship The Jewel of the Seven Seas would be unloading only to be told it had docked already.
He directed one of the youths to guide them through the tunnels that led to the appropriate docks.
They arrived just as a container was being unloaded. There were several armed guards watching and X-Ray confirmed that this container had heat signatures inside.
Before they could do anything, a transport arrived accompanied by two flying members of the Chinese State Dragon Force as several emanciated African children were dragged out of the container and into the transport and the decision was taken to follow the vehicle with its 13 children to its destination rather than rescue them here and now.
12 hours later the van and its occupants arrived at an underground military base in Shanghai and the team followed the children inside.
X-Ray saw an unusual energy burst through the concrete walls of the reception area then they all heard screaming coming from a chamber close to the centre of the facility and decided to investigate while Akira and Banshee remained invisible and insubstantial and followed the kids to their cell where a scientist began to examine them.
The scientist was taken out by Akira before he teleported the kids away, travelling in teleport ‘hops’ all the way back to Hong Kong and the underground settlement below the surface of the city.
Banshee freed the other prisoners who, knowing their choices were to stay and possibly be slaughtered as part of some experiment or riot and hope some of them managed to escape.
Having made his way to the central arena-like chamber that the energy signature had emanated from, X-Ray saw a small man strapped to a chair while an alien looking device shone down on him seemingly absorbing his powers and transferring them to another man across the room. Above them in a gallery, several masked and uniformed individuals sat around and watched as the prisoner became more shrunken and shrivelled, the other gained muscle mass.
The transfer device was a jagged piece of unidentified crystal about three-and a-half feet long, blue radiating as cold as ice, but lacking any sort of obvious power source. It glowed faintly as it floated between the floor and roof of the chamber.
X-Ray (and later Banshee) could feel the device tug at and try to absorb their powers due to their proximity to the alien-looking device.
Banshee unleashed a shattering shriek as she and the prisoners passed the chamber doors causing a backlash that caused it to crash to the ground, enabling the bound Meta in the chair to be able to escape with the other prisoners.
X-Ray considered grabbing the shard but could feel it still trying to steal his powers, still weakening him, so elected to flee while he still could. He grabbed hold of Banshee and they both turned to stealth mode and fled before meeting up with Akira and the rescued children. Together they made it back to the Chinese sanctuary where the elderly gentleman opened a portal back to the relative safety of London Below.
Christmas day was spent returning the kidnapped children to their parents in North Africa.
There was other good news – Agent Wallace had been reprimanded by his superiors for electing to transport the Stormer youth to a high security prison hundreds of miles away without seeking approval or thinking through the risks. Frankie, having hacked into M.E.T.A.’s secure network, broke the news to the press anonymously much to the Agency’s displeasure. That almost made the teams Christmas on its own.
It was also Frankie that thought he’d identified the facility they’d escaped from as belonging to the Zhōngyāng Diànlì Jítuán or Central Power Collective, a secretive department of the Chinese Government. It had grown out of a conspiracy within the Central Military Committee and now operated covertly and without oversight so as to not be influenced by the current government’s politics.
The Collective had a nearly unlimited budget apparently acquired by hiding costs within other projects and used it to monitor the population for super-beings. When it found one, Collective forces brought that person to their headquarters in Shanghai where he or she was subjected to an alien artefact known as “Gai Suipiàn”, or “the Shard”.
Its origins were apparently a mystery even to those who knew how to wield it.
Rumour had it that when brought into contact with a super-powered being and activated, the Shard drained those super powers in a process a Collective Director had dubbed “flatlining.” The victim was rendered mundane – these powers were then able to be stored or transferred to another person, though it was further rumoured that they only lasted for about 18 months and if the transferred powers were not removed before then, resulted in the death of the subject. It would explain the turnover in the Chinese Dragon Force.
Banshee noted that the kidnapped African children could potentially hold the key to the permanent transfer of powers in their seemingly unique genetic makeup.
Magma was arrested at an abandoned Christmas Park in the County of Mercia on Christmas morning and charged as an illegal immigrant and unregistered Meta but escaped the same day having used his powers to burn down the holiday village. The only problem was that he knew the location of the team’s base.
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 