‘CODE
NINE. THIS IS A CODE NINE. ALL SUPERHEROES REPORT TO THE CONTROL ROOM.’
BOB shouted
through Phreak’s mobile over the din of the wailing siren. Psylocke leapt up, nearly knocking the table
over in her haste.
‘Report,’
she barked.
‘Miss
Metamorphosis has escaped custody.’ BOB
said. ‘Citizens converged at random
outside the police station where she was being held and managed to release her
from her cell. Initial reports are that
their mindless behaviour was due to a mind-control stimulant, likely
administered through the money Miss Metamorphosis handled at the bank.’
‘Bitch,’
breathed Cassandra.
‘Wait
here.’ Psylocke gestured for our heroes
to stay put. ‘Except you, Phreak. Come with me.’
‘Wait. Why can’t we come? We could help.’ Nymph said.
Psylocke shook her head.
‘You’re new
recruits.’
‘So?’
‘None of you
are properly insured yet.’
‘Lame.’
Vixen shook her head as Psylocke and Phreak hurried from the room.
Our heroes
looked at each other as the siren cut off, leaving them in silence.
‘Now what?’
Devi asked. Joules got up and
stretched.
‘I don’t
know about you, but I intend to get some head space.’ She said as she ambled out the door.
After an awkward
pause Vixen also got up. ‘It wouldn’t
hurt to explore this place. With
Psylocke and the others out of the way we can have a proper look around.’
She slipped
noiselessly from the room. With a shrug
Façade and then Cassandra also left.
Nymph sidled up to Devi who blushed.
‘I’m
starving.’ She batted her eyelashes at
Devi. ‘Tell you what, gorgeous. Why don’t you see if you can rustle me up
something from the kitchen? I could
murder a bacon buttie.’
Vixen
wandered to the end of the first corridor.
She heaved the heavy doors at the end of it open. To her surprise, she found herself in a
wood-panelled library, heavy with silence, filled floor to ceiling with shelves
stacked with leather-bound books. It
would be interesting to see what passed for light reading at MI13, she thought
as she browsed the shelves.
Cassandra stumbled
upon an untidy room that looked like some kind of workshop, filled with wires
and circuit boards among other devices, which from the way they were scattered
about looked like they had been dropped in a hurry.
Wandering
down a different, identical wide corridor, Façade went down a short flight of
steps into a pitch black basement. She
felt along the wall for the light switch.
Florescent tubes hummed and flickered into life overhead, illuminating
the room in dazzling light, revealing row after row of gleaming super cars. This was more like it, she nodded in
satisfaction.
Nymph got
lucky and discovered the one place in MI13 she hoped to find. A sterile, white lab, filled with test tubes,
bottles with skulls and crossbones on them, microscopes and Bunsen
burners. She hugged herself and
immediately hopped up on a stool to examine one of the Petri dishes.
Devi, unable
to resist Nymph’s charms was looking anxiously for the kitchen, heaving a sigh
of relief when she found it. A quick
scout around the fridge and cupboards and she soon had everything she
needed. She lit the hob, laid the bacon
on the frying pan and hummed to herself as it began to sizzle.
Joules,
meanwhile, had paced the corridors, looking for nothing and no one in
particular; just trying, like she had said, to get some head space.
Softly,
almost silently, the doors leading to each of the rooms swung on their hinges
and with a heart-juddering crash, simultaneously slammed shut.
Vixen was
contemplating the volume Diplomatic
Solutions for Confrontational Villains alongside a hardback edition of Fifty Shades of Grey when the doors to
the library swung shut. She felt the slam
as much as heard it, jumping a foot in the air, swearing loudly.
Nymph looked
up, saw the door to the lab swing shut and snorted. She swivelled around in her chair, humming to
herself, tweeting; I can’t believe the
MI13 scientists didn’t use a counterbalance in the centrifuge. #dickhead.
Joules, who
had wandered into the kitchen, heard the bangs echoing down the corridor. She whipped around as the kitchen door
slammed shut in her face. Her throat
went dry. She was trapped. And she was trapped with Devi, who looked up
from her bacon with a mystified expression.
Cassandra
was also bemused to find herself locked in the workshop. She tried the door. It didn’t budge.
Façade rattled
the handle to the garage door. When she
had no luck she hit the intercom button on the wall. There was no response, only white noise. She fished her mobile out of her pocket. No
signal. Thinking, she spoke into it
anyway. ‘BOB? Can you hear me?’
‘Affirmative.’ BOB’s voice crackled.
‘I’m trapped
in the garage and need to bust out. Do
any of these cars have weapons?’
‘Might BOB
suggest the Lexus to your right with the enormous gun fixed to the roof?’
‘Oh, right. Link up to the others’ phones and speak to
them. Find out if they’re trapped too.’
‘Affirmative. Yes. No
worries, sister.’ A fizz of static. ‘I am upgrading my programming to sound more
human.’
‘Shut the
Hell up BOB before I rip your wires out of their socket.’
‘One moment
please.’
Every hero
with a mobile phone felt it vibrate.
Vixen picked up first.
‘Hello? BOB?
What the fuck is going on?’
‘Please
elaborate.’
‘The door to
the library just slammed shut. It’s
locked and I can’t get out. What’s happening?’
‘I don’t
know.’ BOB’s said. ‘No one else is trapped in their rooms.’
Unaware of
BOB’s cryptic conversation, Façade punched through the window of the Lexus and
clambered in. She wasn’t sure if she
knew how to hot wire a car but now was an excellent time to find out.
Thanks to
Nymph’s devastating pheromones unleashed at the bank, Devi remained obsessed with
her crush and more specifically with delivering the requested bacon
sandwich. She looked first at the closed
door, then Joules, then at her bacon sandwich and back at the door again.
‘But how am
I going to bring Nymph her sandwich now?’
She faltered.
‘I’d say
that’s the least of our worries, wouldn’t you?’
Joules snapped.
With her
predicament now clear to her, Devi burst into tears. Her rat familiar Thelma climbed out of her
pocket and onto her shoulder, squeaking sympathetically. Joules rolled her eyes.
Meanwhile,
back in the lab, the still nonplussed Nymph was curiously poking about the
room. She tried to log on to one of the
computers but couldn’t guess the password of the previous user. Then something
caught her eye. She peered closer and
gasped. She couldn’t believe it. These fossil scientists were still using
Windows Vista. No wonder things kept
screwing up around here.
Laughing, she
looked up and noticed something she hadn’t before. Perched on a long bench at the far side of
the room, among beakers filled with blue liquid, and glass apparatus, was a
huge pile of money. Nymph approached and
looked closer. She felt instinctively
that this was the money Miss Metamorphosis had tried to steal from the
bank. MI13 must be trying to figure out
the nature of the mind control substance she covered the bank notes with. Nymph skirted around the edge of the table,
studying but being careful not to touch anything.
Devi’s
shoulders shook as she sobbed. Joules
looked about frantically for a way out - to escape this hormonal madwoman. It was no good. There were no windows and the only door was
the one now barred to them. There was no
other way out of the room. Not at least,
for ordinary people.
Joules held
her mobile phone to her ear. It was
dead, no signal, no dialling tone.
Joules took a steadying breath, shimmered, compressed and vanished. Devi stopped crying mid-sob and stared as
Joules’ mobile clattered to the floor.
Joules
surfed the electrical current down the phone line and emerged through the
nearest mobile she came across. As she
dusted herself off and looked about the workshop she noticed Cassandra cowering
under a bench.
‘I wish you
would give some sort of warning before you do that!’ Cass bellowed.
Across MI13,
our heroes’ mobile phones vibrated. BOB’s voice rang out. ‘I am attempting to contact your fellow
heroes. Please remain
calm. We appear to be in trouble.’
This was
something of an understatement. At that
moment the doors opened and robots flooded through.
‘What the –‘
Vixen didn’t have time for a single curse before she was struck clean across
her shoulders by a robot’s blast and thrown back against the shelves, a cascade
of books tumbling down on top of her.
Façade
looked up over the Lexus dashboard as a glancing blast sheared across the top
of her head. She fell back,
stunned.
Cassandra
and Joules watched in dismay as the robots from the combat simulator burst into
the workshop. Joules made rapid use of
her gifts and disappeared while Cass escaped a blast by burrowing deeper under
the bench she was crouched under.
She pressed
her fingers to her temple, trying to ignore the crossfire. As she suspected, her psychic powers were
being blocked somehow. This was looking
like a classic set up. Or at least, she
assumed this was what a classic set up looked like. She didn’t have much experience of this in
her day job. Misplaced handkerchiefs and
white rabbits appearing in odd places were the order of the day when you were a
magician’s assistant. Nevertheless, she
was learning fast.
A force of
will broke through the block and she quickly read the minds of the others. They were in similar dire straits. This was so a set up.
Back in the
kitchen, Devi’s bacon mission reached its sorry and premature conclusion. When the first mechanical menace marched
through the door and trained its beam on her she did the first thing that came
naturally and held up the plate of Nymph’s sandwiches as a shield.
The blast
dissolved the plate into a cloud of dust. Looked like Nymph would be #hangry - an unfortunate blend of hungry
and angry about it - a while longer.
Unable to
contain her devastation at the loss of the bacon, Devi threw back her head and
screamed, levitating off the floor and rapidly turning blue.
Her fire
spell shot out of her fingertips and blasted the robot’s head off.
At the same
moment, Nymph was polishing off a leftover box of chocolates she had found in
one of the cupboards and wondering where her Smurf-like admirer was with her
bacon sandwich when she heard the commotion down the corridor.
Smelling the
proverbial rodent, she quickly necked a vial of her special serum. Vines and leaves creaked and rustled as they
sprung from her skin, leaving her a bark-hardened hero ready to kick arse.
The first
robot through the door got a tube of acid in its face. It collapsed, melting, into a heap.
Nymph
grabbed another tube and held it over her head, aiming for the next robot when
the room started humming. She
froze. It was a familiar melody. One she thought she had forgotten – a melody
that closed the gap between the years since she was last trussed up in a lab
like this, frightened, helpless, while her mother injected her with the latest
serum the scientists had created, all the while humming to her daughter,
humming that tune…
The tube
slid from Nymph’s fingers and shattered; the acid burning through the floor
tiling. She stood quite literally
rooted, frozen in fear as the melody echoed through MI13’s tannoy system.
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