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This message Premiere #16: Lost Children was posted by The Hooded Hood has noted that now everyone knows who is writing this nearly everyone has stopped reading on Sunday, March 31, 2002 at 14:40.
Previous chapters at the Premiere Archive
Billings, Idaho was a bombed ghost town now. It had been ground zero at the Parodyverse end of the dimensional estate transference initiated by the Red Watchman when he had wanted to move Technopolis. Billings had suddenly found itself under an alien sky, cut off from home at the focal point of an incoming Sov-Bloc assault force. It had not fared well in the attack.
“This is not good,” NTU-150 reported as he returned from his flyover of the devastation. “I didn’t pick up any movement in the ruins.”
“People have probably learned to avoid metahumans,” Al B. Harper suggested, processing the scanner results in the captured Sov-Bloc grav cruiser. “You may have to go in on the ground.”
“There must be some survivors,” Windblossom argued. “There have to be.”
“We’ll go check,” Phase Shift promised. “But we’d better hurry before it gets dark.”
“I’ll patch the scanners into your armor,” Al B. told NTU. “Then you can read local lifesigns.”
NTU-150 nodded. “Let’s go.”
_______________
“They’re in,” Al B. Harper reported from the scanner console on the SPUD helicarrier, “but the radiation and the advanced tech and the dimensional energies down there are making it impossible to keep a lock on them.”
“Just do your best,” Dan Drury, Director of SPUD, commanded him, chewing on an unlit cigar. “And keep me up ta date on the repairs to this bucket as well. I don’t like the idea of havin’ to go up against some Sov-Bloc flying machines while we’re held together with chewing gum.”
“We’re working on it now,” Al B. assured him. He looked up slyly. “Er, you don’t mind if we borrow a few local parts to make the repairs, do you?”
_______________
NTU-150, Phase Shift, and Windblossom picked their way through the ruins to the heart of the disruption that was obscuring Al B.s’ sensors. From here they could hear the mournful singing.
“It’s beautiful,” Kareen O’Connor whispered. “It’s like… lost innocence.”
Phase Shift felt his stomach tighten as he watched the gentle plant-sensitive smile at the music. “We’d better be careful,” he suggested. “I’m trying to remember some science police briefing…”
“I’m not picking up anything on my recording system,” NTU-150 warned. “I think that song might be a telepathic projection.”
Then they saw the fluttering will-o-th-wisps, pastel bubbles of luminescence, dancing over the broken buildings. Windblossom gasped and reached out for one, but Phase Shift grabbed her and made her insubstantial so that her hand slipped through it without ever touching.
“No!” he hissed, terror making his voice brusque. “Get back! I know what these things are now! I know what’s singing!”
“There are people gathered down there,” NTU-150 realized. “Lots of people, sitting listening. And some of them… some are dead.”
“It’s Mad Wendy!” Phase Shift called out. “I know about her. She’s dangerous. She’s Class One dangerous! She’s…”
But then the song overwhelmed them and the music was all that mattered. They followed the dancing lights and were lost.
_______________
Once upon a time there was a beautiful young girl called Wendy. And one night she was visited by invisible friends who took her off to a magical dreamland where children could live forever. And there Wendy’s wonderful friends did things to her, and when she came back home she wasn’t the same little girl at all; but her psionic abilities were class ten, strong enough to make the Science Council consider creating a new classification just for her.
Because Wendy could draw people. Draw them out of their humdrum lives in cold Technopolis and lead them to a magical neverland where they could play forever – or at least their minds could. Their bodies just stayed behind, no longer important, and withered away, unless one of Wendy’s friends should decide to borrow it for a while and have some fun.
They locked Wendy away eventually, pinned with walls of steel to keep her friends at bay, mind-shackled with drugs to quieten her song and dim her lights. But her friends never forgot her, and when the technet went down and Technopolis vanished, they made sure that Wendy stayed behind to be free and bring them new playmates.
And then a new city arrived, and it was full of frightened, bewildered people who were just lost children inside; and Wendy’s friends liked lost children.
“Windblossom! Kareen! Run for it!”
“Martin? What’s the matter?” Windblossom had never heard this degree of panic in her companion’s voice before. He grabbed her and phased her just as NTU-150 intercepted the glowing lights that were aiming for her.
“I know what this is now. We’ve got to get out of here, find some psi-dampners, quarantine the area…”
“Martin, they’re only pretty lights. So pretty... They only want us to play…”
“Windblossom, snap out of it. You can’t let them call to you like that.”
The couple were still phased out of solidity when NTU’s particle beam swept through them in an arc that would otherwise have cut them in two. “If you don’t play that makes you a meanie,” Jamie Bautista warned. “And we don’t like meanies.”
“She got him!” Phase Shift realised as the armored Legionnaire refined the frequency of his energy beam, seeking the wavelength that could kill the intangible science heroes. “Hold tight, Kareen, I’m phasing us through the ground.”
“Ooh! So you do want to play with me at least, Martin,” Kareen O’Connell answered in an unfamiliar, husky, sultry voice, pressing her young body up against her would-be rescuer. “Let’s play.”
Phase Shift only hesitated a moment, but in that moment he was lost.
So Jamie and Kareen and Martin went to play in Wendy’s world, and some of Wendy’s friends decided to go and play in the bodies they no longer wanted.
_______________
But there was a problem. He was big and mean and he wore black like all villains do. He came down from the skies like an angel of death, and his thermal spray cut through the will-o-th-wisps and his indomitable will ignored Wendy’s song.
Wendy’s friends turned NTU-150 and Phase Shift and Windblossom against him, but he was ready for that. He took down Windblossom first, almost gently, just a light pressure on her neck to send her body to sleep. Then when Phase Shift tried to make him insubstantial he used his thermal ray to explode one of the ruined buildings, spraying Martin Hernandez with fragments and then using his distraction to render him unconscious too.
NTU-150 was more difficult. The armored Legionnaire had pulse cannons that actually hurt the science hero, and his computer tracking systems were almost fast enough to keep on their hyperspeeded target. But Premiere hammered his adversary into the ground and fused the main servo motor in that lethal combat armor.
Wendy was sat in the ruins of Billings surrounded by a circle of the townsfolk who had been listening to her stories. Some were dead, others merely in the last stages of starvation and dehydration. All were happy.
“You won’t get away with this, you awful meanie,” Wendy vowed as Victor Brooke approached her. And then she unleashed the combined wills of all the people she had ever enmeshed in her neverland against him.
Premiere gasped and staggered as they ripped into his mind, denying him the strength and speed and invulnerability that he usually willed upon himself. The lure of fantasy was there, or a world with no responsibilities, no sorrow, no change. He could put down his burdens and be a child again, forever.
But he was needed here. Some fundamental urge to help others, to do the right thing, burned stronger than the weariness that urged him to surrender. He could not let down the people who depended on him.
So Wendy pulled a pair of scissors from her pocket and stabbed him again and again and again.
“Wendy, stop!” he shouted at her as he toppled bleeding onto the pavement. “You know it’s wrong to play with sharp objects!”
The girl hesitated.
Premiere tried to breathe despite the wounds in his chest. “Is this any way to treat a grown-up who has come to take the children to bed?”
“I… no, it’s not bedtime!”
Premiere prevaricated while his healing powers returned. “Look at the sky, Wendy. See how dark it’s getting. Look how tired your playmates here are.”
“But… I don’t want to say goodbye!”
And suddenly her friends were with her, complaining about the baddie, warning her, urging her to be naughty once again. They told her just what to do to kill him dead so he would never be a meanie ever again.
And yet…
And yet he had kind eyes, and a sad kind of face that didn’t seem angry or mean. He was talking to her nicely, like a daddy, and she was so tired, so tired of playing for so long.
Wendy’s friends got angry then, and they warned her what they would do to her again if she was a bad girl.
That frightened Wendy, because when her friends got angry they could hurt her with all the imagination of a vicious child. But this time she had a hero. So she brought Premiere to neverland to meet her friends.
“Help me,” she asked him simply.
“Of course,” Premiere promised. Wendy’s friends had swords and hooks and teeth and claws, but Premiere had truth and justice.
_______________
“So what are we supposed to do with a high-end psychotic psionic?” Dan Drury demanded in frustration as Premiere and the others returned to the helicarrier with the Billings refugees.
“Well,” NTU-150 explained, “I introduced Wendy to Yo. I think Wendy will like the Happy Place.”
_______________
Wendy did like the Happy Place. It was full of new friends, with wonderful floppy ears and twitchy noses and curious whiskers. There was even a special friend who came to see her there to show her a new kind of game that children weren’t allowed to play.
“Hiya, baby. So what’s a nice megapsionic like you doing in a place like this?” Space Ghost greeted her.
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- Premiere #16: Lost Children - The Hooded Hood has noted that now everyone knows who is writing this nearly everyone has stopped reading - 14:40 on March 31, 2002
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