By Ant L. (Team Archivist)
Black Box characters by Louis Porter Jr & Calypso from Vigilance Press
X-Ray struck a power-pose: took a deep breath, chest enlarged, abdomen sculpted like a Greek god, his limbs muscular and firm. “That should do it, Brian,” said Akira, shutting the camera off, “I’ll get these pictures sent off to the design studio first thing, then you should be in the shops for Christmas!”
Brian let his breath out, barely dropping his frame at all; the benefits of being a Meta and a Chosen of Gaia. “And these action figures are how big?” he was trying to act cool, but inside he was more excited about being included in The Balance’s range of 12” collectable action figures, as manufactured by Signal-GK Enterprises, than most children were about Saint Nicholas leaving them presents in a few weeks’ time.
Akira didn’t look back as he headed for a computer terminal, “A good foot, I think…”
<<Incoming message for Balance members designations: Akira, Banshee, and X-Ray>> The Frankie AI seemed to excel in ruining the team’s downtime. Still their Commdot communicators were useful, especially with their integrated translation system. <<Meteorological agencies are reporting unusual hurricane activity off the western coast of Eire. There is a non-operational oil rig in the path of the weather pattern and there are concerns for the integrity of the platform.>>
“Frankie,” Banshee chimed, “can you discover who owns the rig? And is there anything peculiar about the storm at all?”
<<The oil rig is in disputed International Waters off the West Coast of Éire. Please wait whilst I hack into a Russian satellite that is currently in orbit above the hurricane… the storm has changed its course on two occasions in the past fifteen minutes and is now heading directly towards the platform. I would postulate that this is not a natural occurrence.>>
Akira looked to Banshee, who shrugged. The last time a storm acted in a manner like this, the team was cast into Akira’s so-called garbage dimension!
Frankie piped up again, <<The hereditary ruler of Carpathia, Baroness Natasha Sylvestri von Ruthenia, is understood to be onboard. The rig is wholly owned by her. The rig has not produced any oil since it was built and sited in its current location. Carpathia claims that the platform is in international waters, but the U.K. claims it to be in their territorial waters.>>
Akira and Banshee quickly brought X-Ray up to speed. The Court of Shadows and the Seminarium Sinister of Setekh both had links to Carpathia, and the country had previously declared the Balance terrorists. X-Ray rolled his eyes; more vampires, and he was now guilty by association with The Balance. He loved this job… sometimes.
Akira continued, telling Brian about the previous Balance member, Young Sam, who had been altered by the Seminarium and given Dragonesque powers using their knowledge of what they had classified as ‘Mys-Tech’, a combination of mystical and technological capabilities, to enhance humans to a Meta level.
They talked as they walked, and soon they were strapping themselves into their flight seats inside The Crate. X-Ray turned to Akira, “Why does Banshee always fly the plane?”
Akira turned to X-Ray, “Can you?”
Brian opened his mouth to speak, realized where the comment would end up, and shut up. It wasn’t that he had anything against female drivers, as a rule, but the last time Mary tried parallel parking…
Half-an-hour saw The Balance leaving The Crate on auto-pilot hover mode and exiting the craft. Even three-hundred metres away from the rig they were being buffeted by strong winds, and X-Ray’s extraordinary vision revealed the cause of the maelstrom; in the eye of the storm, right above the deck of the oil rig, was a flying black woman, obviously in control of the weather phenomena. With a wave of her arms lightning bolts erupted from the blackened skies and clove through the clouds, splitting the darkness with bright neon light, striking the deck with thunderous power. Dodging the bolts were several people; six males wearing identical black hi-tech ninja uniforms with three red… what? Lenses?… on their headsets, and carrying blaster rifles, and a single attractive woman wearing an expensive-looking dress. Thankfully for X-Ray, there were no feelings revealing the presence of Anti-Life; whoever these people were, they weren’t vampires.
X-Ray relayed the information to the others, and all three flew towards the woman in the sky. Banshee recognised her as being known by the nom-de-guerre of Calypso, ‘she who conceals’ – the impenetrable cloud cover went some way to proving that.
X-Ray assumed that she had some level of resistance to the detrimental effects of her own weather control powers, since she wasn’t wrapped up in warm clothing. Thinking similar thoughts, Akira offered her one of his cloaks…
“What!?” she screamed into the air, the revolving winds carrying her voice around them like a mad demi-goddess. “Can’t we talk about this like normal people?” Akira continued, fully realising his pun, “I mean, what have those people ever done to you?”
“They turned me into a monster!”
Ah!
“They are turning others into monsters!” she continued.
KRAK-A-BOOM
“Arrgghh!” X-Ray spun away, his costume torn and smoking, the after-effect of a lightning strike against him. He had neglected to raise his force field defences, and paid the price. Banshee could tell that he was badly hurt, off-balance; she was just glad that she had turned herself into her ghostly form as they flew out of The Crate.
Shots whistled past them from the deck; the guards were using their distraction to try their luck against Calypso.
‘Does that make them storm-troopers?’ mused Akira. ‘Same school of shooting…’
As deftly as he could, Akira waved his hands in mystical incantation, sending one of his trademark blasts just wide of Calypso.
A hail of shots rang out from below, and several found a mark… passing straight through Banshee’s incorporeal form.
Calypso was steadying herself following Akira’s attack on her when she suddenly screamed and began to hurtle towards the deck of the rig. Banshee turned to see X-Ray holding his arms out in front of him, his face a mask of pained concentration. It was easy to mistake his gravi-kinetic abilities as something much like Akira’s telekinesis, but the effect of altering an object’s gravitational field, to go against the natural order of the planet at his whim… she was impressed.
Banshee heard the bounce and the yelp as Calypso hit the deck hard, bouncing and rolling several yards before she stopped, moaning in pain and holding her left shoulder delicately with her right hand. Banshee nodded at the others, and they all swooped down, fending off the blaster fire from the guards.
Banshee radiated an aura of fear as she closed in on the guards and the woman in the designer dress, whom she now recognized as the Baroness of Carpathia. She stood her ground, apparently unaware that the six guards were all backing off, afraid of the spectral entity heading in their direction.
Not that her strength of will did her much good; with a triple-blast of mystical power, Akira rendered her unconscious.
X-Ray tried to take Calypso down with a high-frequency Gamma-ray beam, but his injuries threw his aim wide. In response Calypso hit him squarely with a huge water spout, knocking him several yards into the air – thankfully his forcefield prevented him from being injured or getting wet, but he took it as another warning to keep his guard up.
Two of the black-clad guards summoned enough fresh courage to run back to their mistress, picking the Baroness up between them and dragging her towards the rig’s helipad. The pad was empty, and X-Ray had to use his telescopic vision to spot it in the far distance, struggling to navigate the whirling storm winds. Looking also at the lightning bolt damage, Brian considered it unlikely that the pilot could have landed safely, storm or not.
As Calypso raised her arms to manipulate the storm once again Banshee crashed into her, grabbing her shoulders with both her hands. Calypso screamed as unearthly energies flowed into her body, and her skin began to desiccate and blister as Banshee’s corrupting touch took hold. Suddenly, Calypso exploded into a cascade of water, a rain-lashed puddle that rolled eerily towards the edge of the deck. The Balance could only watch as the water spilled over the edge and disappeared into the stormy seas.
The other four guards had recovered their wits and were shooting wildly at the heroes, trying to cover the escape of their beloved Baroness. Without the helicopter, the two guards that were carrying the Baroness headed towards a set of stairs that led below deck, but Akira was too quick for them, hitting them both with a mystical blast that sent the Baroness over the side.
With the storm beginning to abate since Calypso’s disappearance, X-Ray could have sworn that he heard the splash as the Baroness hit the water, even though he didn’t see it happen. He relayed his intentions to his team-mates, then flew over the deck and down the far side of the rig, entering the ocean to look for her body. Despite his enhanced vision, both telescopic and infra-red, he could find no sign of her.
When Banshee heard this over the Comm-dot she cast a ritual of sensing; instead of the Baroness, she discovered a “gap” in the fabric of reality near to her location – something strange was underneath the rig…
When X-Ray surfaced, puzzled about the Baroness’s absence, he saw something that he had not noticed on his way down; a huge black cube, suspended under the rig. It was attached to the interior aspects of the huge legs of the rig, there was a hatch in the centre of the upper surface, and it was reached by the sea-rusted stairwell that the guards had been making for. From the dimensions he could see, he reckoned that around two-thirds of its mass was underwater.
“Banshee, Akira! You really need to come down here and look at this thing!”
Avoiding the guards gunfire in their own unique ways, they joined X-Ray, landing on the upper surface of the jet-black cube. With an eye on the stairs, watching out for the guards, X-Ray opened the hatch, allowing Akira and Banshee to head down inside, following them down and securing the hatch from the inside.
Almost immediately, they knew this was no ordinary metal construct – Banshee shifted from her ghostly state to a substantial form, totally against her will; X-Ray began to get a headache, realizing that he had lost contact with the electro-magnetic spectrum of the planet – and despite the apparent lack of effect on him, Akira was, nonetheless, perplexed and excited at the sight of the office they had entered, replete with computers, securely-locked exit doors, and subdued lighting.
In a heartbeat he was putting his eye up to a retinal scanner, visibly slumping his shoulders when the result was [Access Denied]. A second later and he was waggling a computer mouse, waking up the sleeping screen and digesting the contents of the screen.
“This is interesting… I think,” he said, still reading.
“Damn place is E.M. shielded,” X-Ray declared, rubbing his temples.
“And it has some kind of mystical shield in place, too,” added Banshee, prodding her arm to make sure she wasn’t imagining it, “this is something to do with their Mys-Tech programme.”
“We can’t reach Frankie, either,” said Akira, “the Comm-dots are down. Never mind that, though, take a look at this.”
He indicated a screen containing a number of names, each with a ‘life-signs’ display next to them. Each name also had a command button that read ‘Termina’, “I wonder what happens if I press that?” Akira pondered.
Banshee looked around. They were in a deserted office located in the top level of the cube – a dozen computer screens illuminated the room, each emitting an unhealthy glow in the gloom. The screen that Akira was staring at seemingly tracked the vital signs of a dozen individuals, though some appeared to be deceased. One name stood out amongst the living; Calypso!
Akira pointed at various parts of the screen as he showed his two team-mates around the display: two of the ‘dead’ just had numbers allocated to their identity, but the others were still alive, though who, or what, they were proved to be a mystery.
Slick, Scarab, Mayhem, Breakout, Biohazard, Lodestone, and Crack were clearly still alive. The button beneath Calypso’s name had clearly been activated and revealed a sub menu in English of options for each name – including ‘Termina’ and a red flashing command ‘Eliberare – DA?’, that now appeared on the screen beside the ten names including the two with no life signs.
Under ‘Eliberare – DA’ were several options in Cyrillic and one in English simply marked “The Red Wire”…
Akira wiggled the mouse, placing the cursor over the ‘Eliberare – DA’ button for the person called Crack. “It can’t hurt, can it?”
“Termina must relate to terminate,” Brian chipped in, “though it may not mean death. It could mean ‘switch-off’ or deactivate. Either way, the other option seems like the better one, seeing as how we don’t know what this all relates to.”
“Yeah, let’s do it!” And with that, Akira hit the button. Spectacularly, nothing happened.
“Oh, well, that was disappointing…” Akira looked crestfallen for a few seconds, but then, “I wonder what else I can find on this thing?”
Soon, Akira was gleefully pointing to one of the other screens, “External camera!” he exclaimed happily, before, “Oh, the guards are coming down the stairs.”
Banshee was looking around, “I think we’re safe enough in here; we control the hatch mechanism. Anyone else smell something?”
She and X-Ray found the cause of the smell – melting metal. The locked door that Akira had failed to open was starting to glow red with applied heat. As they looked, the small glass panel in the door cracked, drawing their eyes to the small portal. Beyond it they could see shapes, people, at least three.
“Akira, we are going to have incoming any second!”
“Yes, maybe seven, possibly nine.” He replied calmly.
“What have you done?”
“Nothing! Well, by ‘nothing’ I mean that I pressed the buttons on all the names on the screen, so I may have woken them all up, but apart from that…”
Banshee rolled her eyes; X-Ray wondered whether he could rely on his gravi-kinetic powers against those kind of odds. He tried to access his E.M. powers… residual energy only.
The door collapsed in molten sections, and several people entered the office, all angry. One was wearing a large battlesuit; another seemed to be a living nightmare, composed of worm-like tendrils; most were recognizable as human. The lead man, glared at The Balance.
“What the hell have you done to us?!” he yelled, striking a combative pose.
X-Ray played his trump card. Summoning the last of his ambient energy he surrounded himself with a plasma field that sparked when it annihilated dust and fibres in the air. His eyes glowed a fiery orange, leaking a plasma trail into the air as he bellowed, “Calm. Down. Now!”
The man, apparently the one code-named Crack, was taken aback by Brian’s display of power; he took a step backwards, obviously nervous about the threat in front of him.
Brian pressed his advantage. “I am X-Ray. This is Banshee, that is Akira. We are The Balance, and we are not responsible for your being here.”
“No,” chirped Akira, “we have just released you. You’re welcome.”
X-Ray continued, “We are not your enemies and we do not want to fight you. We want to understand what’s happened here. Please, take a breath, and tell me what you can about all this. Who are you? What happened to you?”
Crack seemed to deliberate with himself for a moment, before he relaxed, the tension draining from his body. “My name is Archie Friel. The last thing I can remember is the accident. I was in an accident, not sure what happened, but I was badly hurt. I was in the back of an ambulance… then I woke up here, in a tube. They did things to me… to all of us, waking us up every-so-often to experiment with our bodies. I remember something about a cortex bomb whatever that is, and the others…” he waved his arm towards the rest of the figures behind him.
Banshee looked directly at X-Ray, who was professionally calm as he slowly approached Crack. “Do you mind if I examine your head. It won’t take a second.”
Archie nodded his agreement, and Brian quickly found a one-inch incision scar. “It would be useful if I could examine as many of you as are willing. This could be a serious situation, and the more you co-operate, the better we can help you.”
Brian examined three of the others, all had similar scars.
“Okay, this will be a shock to you all, and I cannot sugar-coat it, but it is possible that you have been fitted with cortex bombs in your skulls. We need you to come with us to receive medical treatment as soon as possible.”
The room went into meltdown. Banshee had to block the ladder to the hatch to prevent people from climbing out, but that caused a couple of the group to throw threats her way. People were shouting; they wanted out, they wanted someone to hit out at, to pay back for everything that had happened to them.
Akira indicated to Banshee that she should open the hatch and let them take their frustrations out on the guards who were now standing on top of the cube, probably wondering when The Balance would come out again. Banshee did, indeed, open the hatch, but she produced her aura of fear and caused the guards to back away again, keeping them away from the hatch. Seconds later, the former prisoners were climbing out, to find that they had no idea they were at sea.
As Brian attempted to keep everyone calm, Akira attempted to read the mind of one of the ‘non-living’ metas, who had seemingly been code-named Sea Devil. He was scared, but deeper within his mind he was thinking that he had a mission to complete. Akira switched his power onto Crack, who had no subconscious thoughts regarding a mission.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Akira, before he informed Banshee and X-Ray of his discovery.
“Perhaps they have been hardwired to perform set functions,” said X-Ray, and The Balance returned to the office inside the cube, where Banshee used the computer to locate Sea Devil’s protocols, and she pressed the ‘Red Wire’ button as Akira monitored his thoughts. He detected no discernible changes.
“Nothing different, Banshee.”
Banshee thought for a second, then began to search the system for more information. Whilst it wasn’t straightforward, a couple of minutes later she found some useful translated information.
“I think that Red Wire pauses the cortex bombs!” she exclaimed, “That will buy us all some time.” With that, she switched off every bomb in the list.
Back outside, with the guards’ part-way up the stairwell, obviously outnumbered and looking very nervous, X-Ray imparted the news that they were safe for now, though they all needed to consider having the bombs removed to be perfectly safe. In response, several people started to shout about how they were all stuck in the middle of nowhere, and Sea Devil took the opportunity to leap off the cube and into the ocean. Whatever was running through his head, he was on his own now.
X-Ray, his E.M. powers returning now that he was outside the cube again, sensed a build-up of nearby infra-red heat energy; he narrowed it down to the man called Breakout. Calmly, with a friendly smile on his face, he walked over, “Hello. It’s okay, no need to be alarmed. I wonder, are you aware that your body is building up energy?”
“Wha… what? Building up what?!” He was obviously unaware of his precarious circumstance, and scared out of his wits.
Banshee read the situation and transformed into Mary, as in that form she could manifest and use her harp to play a soothing lullaby. As the gentle music began, Brian tried his best bedside manner.
“You’re alright, don’t let it scare you. Remember that you are in control, you just need to calm down a bit. Now, after me… deep breath in… hold it… you are safe, you are in control… and let it out… there you go, that’s good. Now, keep taking slow, deep breaths… yeah, there you go, your body temperature is cooling down nicely!”
Breakout managed a brief smile, but he was visibly shaken, and sweating with the exertion of keeping his power under control. This was all so new to him, and to the others, and they were all struggling to understand their new situation.
With a roar of jet propulsion units, the armoured battlesuit bulk of Scarab took to the air and flew off, prompting X-Ray and Banshee to remind the remaining metas’ that it was in their own best interests to go with them back to Wessex for medical treatment. The cortex bombs were only on a pause cycle – they needed to be removed surgically to ensure that they could never be activated.
In answer to several concerns, Banshee explained to everyone present how metas’ in the U.K. were looked after by various agencies; she was very matter-of-fact, and calm, and it helped somewhat to assuage the fears of several of the remaining group. The Balance also offered to get them to Wessex in the Crate, indicating the craft still hovering away in the distance.
Akira raised a proposition; it would be a good idea to wipe the data from the computer systems in the cube, possibly even to destroy them altogether – that may have an even longer effect on the codes that operated the cortex bombs, at least enough for the surgeries to occur.
The Balance had a quick conversation, then explained their plan to the group of nervous metas’ around them. Akira would take care of the guards, then X-Ray would use his gravi-kinetic powers to lift anyone that could not fly over to the Crate, but first they asked for volunteers to search the cube, and then to destroy the computers and any servers they might find.
Several of the Mys-Tech group joined in, eager to keep busy and take their minds off their cortex bombs for a while. Mayhem, a young woman with a half-shaved head of shocking blue hair, Breakout, and Crack all helped and soon they had scoured the cube, finding evidence of cybernetic implants, hi-tech machinery and battlesuit parts, as well as mystical circles and other symbols etched into the walls and floors around the laboratories deeper within the cube. There were no other people present and so, with a gentle question, Breakout was asked to remain inside the cube and to unleash his radioactive energies, whilst X-Ray remained outside the hatch ready to collect him.
Despite his nervousness, the man did as he was asked. Moments later he was out of the cube, wisps of smoke or steam escaping as he opened the hatch. X-Ray helped him out, and held the shaking youth as he stumbled, exhausted, across the cube’s upper surface. It was done.
Akira used a spell of persuasiveness to alter the guards’ perceptions of the situation, and in another moment he was creating a portal to a familiar landmark in Dublin and ushering the guards through it.
X-Ray lifted everyone else into the air as gently as he could, altering the flow of gravity around the group in order to push them all to the Crate. Another man, code-named Lodestone, used his powers of magnetism to unlock the dorsal hatch to the Crate, and everyone climbed inside. Only a quiet woman in a rather tight black leather bodysuit remained unknown, though by a process of elimination The Balance were able to work out that she was the one code-named Slick. The strangely tentacled meta was nicknamed Wormy – simple, and to-the-point, but better than the series of numbers he had been allocated on the computer system back at the cube. Biohazard was a man possessed of powers to unleash disease, which X-Ray found both fascinating and repulsive. None of this was their fault, and now he had another enemy, in the nation of Carpathia.
It turned out that the battlesuit, Scarab, was a woman, but nothing else was known about her or her suit’s capabilities. Mayhem apparently had control over shockwaves, or high-frequency soundwave vibrations, whilst Crack could destroy the atomic bonds between atoms, effectively melting materials to goo.
Upon arriving back in Wessex, arrangements to have the group transported to a medical facility for treatment were well under way. Things got off to a bad start as Breakout immediately left without a word, a move that disappointed X-Ray, but the others all accepted the offers of help. They would hopefully all undergo surgery to remove or at least deactivate the bombs, then go into training to learn the usage and control of their abilities.
Everything was going swimmingly until, a week later, the Baroness reappeared in Carpathia, on television, explaining her recent absence as her resting in a rural spiritual retreat, and looking about 10 years younger than previously seen on a television broadcast. She gave a predatory smile to the camera as she called The Balance terrorists responsible for an unprovoked attack on an oil platform in international waters, and that they had used MMDs (Metas of Mass Destruction) to damage the rig.
“It is unfortunate,” she smiled, “that there is no extradition treaty between the U.K. and Carpathia. It remains the intention of the Carpathian nation to see these criminals brought to justice for their crimes against our sovereign state.”
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 