Chris was aware that something was very wrong almost as soon as he woke – his almost autonomic attempts to interface mentally with the internet via his iPad failed to access anything. He reached out further with his mind and confirmed that none of his fellow inmates could access the internet either. It wasn’t just the Wi-Fi that was down, his mobile phone had no service either.
That got him out of bed. He dressed quickly and headed to the common room, which had cabled access to the school’s Black Fibre Network (BFN), passing Colin just back from his early morning run round the school grounds. Chris didn’t stop to chat, he needed his online ‘fix’ and that meant that the BFN was his BFF. Thankfully, despite absolutely nothing being transmitted over the ‘aether’, cabled access still worked.
He let out a sigh of relief, immediately logged on and collapsed back into a chair in shock. News was still being relayed but only over fixed connections and landlines, something was blocking radio transmissions and it wasn’t just locally.
There had been a communications blackout in the last few hours across the whole of the Northern Hemisphere with all radio communications interrupted and no one knew why. Entire nations had been suddenly and completely cut‐off from the outside world except where telephone cables existed. Old undersea communication cable lines were being used as the primary form of international communication. Sea vessels were completely isolated, with guidance systems, mobile communications and navigational systems all non‐functional; everything from mobile phones to GPS systems to anti‐espionage satellite communications were suddenly and inexplicably silent. All planes in the top half of the world were grounded and many countries were not reacting ‘well’ to having their air forces and missiles taken completely out of operation. Thankfully despite a number of emegency landings, no planes – commercial or military – had crashed. That in itself was a miracle.
Cabled internet and television were still working thankfully but satellite, communications towers, television signals etc. were currently all being blocked by some unknown means from transmitting. That meant the school’s black fibre network was functional but there is no Wi-Fi and no reception on mobile phones.
The BBC News reported that the whole world was acting paranoid as phone lines became the only reliable form of communications over the whole of the northern half of the world.
No country or organisation had claimed responsibility for what was assumed to be an act of technological terrorism and no demands had been made, so far. World governments however, feared the worst and had stopped trusting each other with China or North Korea being declared the prime suspects, simply because the blackout hadn’t affected them. The world Governments had begun establishing word‐of‐mouth and land‐line communication routes to secure their borders and had mobilised their armed forces. Tensions were mounting around the globe.
“It has to be Australia or Aotearoa1 behind this, or possibly the Solomon Islands?” He muttered, as he headed to breakfast. Interestingly the school continued running as normal as though nothing was happening!
The morning session went as usual though with some minor alterations to the school curriculum, the weather, wet and miserable seemed to mirror Chris’ mood at being ‘castrated’ from the Internet.
After that morning’s Special Curriculum session, the weather locally turned cold and the rain immediately turned into snow. Within an hour what had started as an unexpected snow shower soon turned into a full-blown blizzard, which caused whiteout conditions in the school grounds and surrounding area.
The school took the decision to send most of the day-trippers home before things got any worse but any pupils whose parents or carers couldn’t be contacted were expected to stay behind with the boarders. That decision did not go down well with some and a number of the day pupils who were still ‘unauthorised’ subsequently vanished between classes, including eight of Chris’s registration group. Presumably they were either outside messing around in the snow or making their own way home regardless.
By lunchtime, the school had informed the remaining pupils that the local authorities had issued a blizzard warning to anyone still able to listen in and instructed the populace to remain indoors where they were, until the unexpected storm had passed.
The remaining pupils were now all trapped in the school. As the storm worsened, the temperature dropped precipitously, several feet of snow accumulated outside and massive snowdrifts blocked the roads. Pupils were warned not to go outside in case the snow collecting on the roof fell on them. Windows were icing up and the snow on the ground outside now came up to an adults’ waist.
Beyond the school walls, the blizzard having struck with little warning, commuters trying to return home found themselves trapped in their vehicles including on the main road outside the reception block. Various accidents caused by the storm have made all of the roads little more than snow covered parking lots, with the city snowploughs unable to clear them because of the bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Mr Andrews pulled Chris and Colin aside and explained that there was a thirteen-vehicle accident blocking traffic on the road outside the Reception Block and would they be willing to help? An Asda delivery truck had jack-knifed trying to avoid a fender bender and numerous cars had collided as they tried to avoid the accident. The vehicles were travelling relatively slowly, so there were no serious injuries as far as he knew but they needed help to evacuate the cars, to allow Princess and Outrage to then subsequently ‘move’ the vehicles off the road and hopefully allow the ploughs to get through. All of the Special Curriculum students were being asked to help the staff if they could.
Nodding their agreement, they were told to head down into Dane’s Domain and make their way underground to reception; Dane was the school caretaker and spent most of his time in the maintenance tunnels in the basement. Dane was ancient, he appeared to be in his late 50’s or 60’s and happily married to Camille who was in her early 20’s which was the subject of much gossip and speculation amongst the students.
The tunnels were supposed to be out of bounds to pupils but Chris and Colin had been down there before, visiting a certain store room off the maintenance tunnels that ran through the basement between the Reception Block and the school when ‘requested’ to attend by the Schadenfreude Society. Not that they wanted to admit that to either Dane or Mr Andrews of course.
Putting their costumes on for extra protection against the cold before grabbing parkas, they took one look at the blizzard outside and Chris pulled out his IR goggles and put them on to shield his eyes. Colin nodded and put his Cadet visor on hoping that under his parka they would just look like futuristic ski goggles. Regardless their eyes would be protected from the searing cold.
Stepping outside, the whiteout was so bad that Colin could only see as far as his own hands and the frigid cold bit deeply into his exposed flesh. They hadn’t had to walk very far through the heavy snows to get to the crashed cars, yet already their legs felt tired.
He was grateful that their comm-units still worked at least in Bluetooth mode, as hearing was nearly impossible with the howl of the winds and visibility almost non-existent. Chris shivered, the intense cold was too much and he found his limbs shuddering uncontrollably. The ice underfoot though was also slippery and Colin almost went sliding, but managed to jerk himself upright just in time. He finally understood why in Dante’s Inferno the innermost circle of Hell was portrayed as a frozen lake of blood and guilt.
Most of the vehicles already had someone trying to help, though some were jammed tight against each other so that either Outrage or Princess were needed to physically lift cars out of the way before they could get people out. Unfortunately, the snows had also just brought down the powerlines, which meant the school would be reliant on their own generators coming online – any… time… soon… Nope, still no power, the school remained dark behind them, emergency lights only.
Chris looked around at the utter chaos and then saw what he thought was movement in the middle of a nearby field. Were there people out there? Meanwhile, Colin had been checking on the contents of the Asda van confirmed it was carrying groceries and not for example, washing powder. That might be useful later if this storm continued.
The hobbling driver from the Asda van came over and asked if anyone had seen the ‘heavy-built’ woman in several layers of coats that had just started walking away towards the field after the crash? There was something about how she’d been hunched over that had worried him.
Chris was sure that despite the whiteout, that there was some rapid movement in the nearby field as though someone was trying to get people’s attention by waving something black; a coat perhaps?
Given the number of students and teachers on-scene, they both decided to check it out and sneaked off towards what they thought was a black coat being waved in the air. Off the road, the snow was even deeper and they found themselves struggling, though the fact that they found a trail of regular indents in the snow seemed to indicate that people had crossed that way before them and fairly recently.
After trudging for several minutes, they managed to make out several school pupils, almost submerged in the snow surrounding a collapsed woman who was screaming in pain. They rushed over as fast as they could and realised that the woman was heavily pregnant and the recent events seemed to have brought on her contractions. The kids had seen her walk away and across the field in the general direction of Wessex and had thankfully followed her.
Between screams, she explained that her name was Emily Rafferty and she was an investment banker who she now agreed had worked far later than her doctor had recommended. She began having contractions while stranded with her fellow motorists. Unable to call for an ambulance, she decided to brave the storm and began walking to the nearest hospital or at least transport. She hadn’t got far when she had collapsed.
They couldn’t stay there, the temperature was still dropping and they had no experience with delivering a baby never mind in a storm ‘au naturel’. The idea of getting her to trudge back across the field towards the school though was a non-starter but Colin had an idea. He took out his cloak and activated the memory cloth then began shaping it into a boat-like shape.
Chris smiled. “Whatcha doin’ bobsleigh man!” he muttered over the comms. “Exactly that, we need to create a solid travois to transport her… Let’s hope no-one recognises what my cloak really is.”
He’d never programmed this function into the cloak so had to manually fold and bend it then stabilise the shape before using his expandable staff to act as a wide handle while explaining to the fascinated students that it was a new type of emergency sleigh. Gently, between them they lifted Emily onto the sledge; put her into recovery position before getting the other school kids to grab hold of his staff and help pull. Slowly but steadily the group headed back towards the school. Once there, Emily was taken inside into one of the study cubicles where she laid on blankets of the floor while Nurse Joy attended to her.
Unfortunately, there was no medical doctor available and she was apparently already dilated so a screen was quickly erected and one of the teachers, “Mama” Hutchins, stayed with her, several emergency lights hanging around to give them light since the whiteout had started to turn day into twilight. The young Year One students who’d found her were sent through the tunnels back to the relative safety of the school.
Meanwhile Chris and Colin, cloak-sleigh in hand, had re-joined their fellow students back outside. As they stepped out a human-shaped shadow, many metres high momentarily eclipsed them then vanished. The giant shadow shook them, was this indicative of something or..? Chris tried to pass it off as an optical illusion, a normal shadow of someone made large by a trick of the car lights projecting the shadow onto the curtain of falling snow.
No time to process what they had seen, the last of the remaining drivers and passengers were being extracted from the cars and one of them, a man called Frank Winchester, in his late sixties, was complaining of severe chest pains and difficulty breathing. His legs started to give out and again Colin and Chris found themselves acting as transport dragging him quickly back to reception and the support of the teaching staff. As they reached the building again they were overshadowed by two tall shadows both at least ten metres high. Again Chris tried to justify it by saying it was likely just a trick of the light and could still be just one person but this time with additional light sources..?
Having handed over Frank to Nurse Joy and collapsed the cape they approached Mr Andrews to see if there was anything more they could do to help. He thanked them and told them to make their way back to the school via the tunnels.
Having seen the worsening conditions outside, Chris was now worried about the missing students from his registration class. What if they were trapped somewhere? It didn’t help that for some reason the primary emergency generator still hadn’t started. They asked Andrews if there was a reason the Challenger-Wildeman Arc Reactor located in Down Below hadn’t come online yet. The school buildings were now almost completely dark, the emergency lighting batteries were running down, the only other lights they had were torches and candles and the rooms were getting colder by the minute.
Chris offered to help try to get it online. Andrews turned towards him, obviously stressed.
“Why? What do you know that we don’t? The generator seems to be malfunctioning and the whole room is currently reduced to absolute zero, which is somehow causing the generator to interact with the school’s dimensional breach. There is a big difference Mr Potts between theoretical knowledge culled off the Internet and practical experience and it’s the latter we need just now.”
He walked off muttering something about ‘preferring to not trust someone to perform surgery after reading up on a procedure on the Internet compared to having someone properly experienced carry out the operation’.
They knew that the shimmering dimensional breach located a 100 metres above the school, a permanent red-tinted aurora caused by hyperfield leakage crystallising local space–time, was a remnant of the Terminus invasion. It was very similar to the shimmer that they had seen near the top of Romaine Wharf just before their departure for Zorandar.
Okay, so their ‘assistance’ was not required Down Below, best to focus on the missing pupils. Several of those missing were part of what was insultingly referred to as the Zee Crewe of Year Four – The unpopular pupils. As soon as they were back in the main building, they did a quick search of the ground floor, assuring each teacher they passed that they only “planned to have a look around the school for the missing students and not go outside”.
When they didn’t find Sham, Smiler or any of the others indoors that promise immediately evaporated. Once more dressed for the cold they pushed their way outside and immediately began to shiver. The temperature was now even colder that before and they both began to tremor uncontrollably. Their idea was if they were outside in this then hopefully, they were still okay but possibly no longer able to see the school building in the whiteout, which had now creating an almost impenetrable curtain of snow.
Something about all this was unnatural – the temperature was still dropping and the outside of the school was starting to resemble an ice cliff more than a man-made structure. They headed towards the red pillar situated next to the sports fields, where they decided to signal to anyone still ‘out there’ to make their way to them by setting off a series of flash bombs in the hope that ‘if they could see the light they will make their way over’.
Several flash pellets were thrown into the air one after the other to act as a sort of flare, however instead of the missing schoolchildren a giant blue figure suddenly appeared, heading towards them from the direction of the ‘Big House’.
The creature was blue-skinned, with long, unruly ginger hair and with a beard to match and carried an axe almost as tall as itself. It stood at least ten metres tall and was dressed in archaic clothes that sort of resembled a millennium old medieval style. He thundered towards them, his feet sinking easily two metres into the snow created a localised blizzard at ground level. Colin immediately thought of pictures he’d seen of snow giants. Drifting beside the massive creature was a dark silhouette of a young girl.
Chris muttered, “For such a big man he casts a very small shadow.” He had no time for any further observations though as the giant creature gestured towards them and a wave on intense cold emanated out towards them. Chris was hit by it and immediately began to shake as it felt as though his whole body was suffering from frostbite. Colin was luckier and managed to avoid the immediate wave though its very presence generated an intense cold.
Chris shouted up, his teeth chattering with the cold, “Excuse me big man, but why are you heading towards the school?”
To his surprise it replied, but it sounded a bit like the creature was speaking in Norwegian or some other Scandinavian language. He so wished he could access google translate just now then realised that the red pillar they were standing near, the tip of which was thankfully still exposed marked an emergency lift to Down Below and that it had cabled access to the BFN..He rushed over, grabbed the top of the pillar and mentally logged in. Thankfully, the school’s annoying AI monitor was either offline or not interfering with his school time access, for once.
He tried to repeat mentally some of the words the giant figure had said into a browser and a quick search confirmed it was apparently speaking a variant of Old Norse. Two words stood out from its reply; Jötunheimr was the realm of giants who in Viking mythology had menaced Midgard and Asgard. Ífingr was the blood-red river that separated the realms of Asgard and Jötunheimr.
Did it just say ‘they’ had crossed the Ífingr from Jötunheimr, why am I here?
He quickly explained what the giant had said to Colin but he seemed to be more focused on the dark silhouette that followed it. “Could you ask who his friend is?” he muttered. Chris sighed, “Google Translate doesn’t include Old Norse so I’m having to use an online dictionary, I can confirm though that it claims to be from Jötunheimr, the realm of the Norse Storm Giants.”
Attempting to piece together a sentence, Chris shouted up in fragmented Norse, “Jötunheimr, want to go back there?”
It stopped and stared at them for a couple of seconds then looked behind it as a second gigantic figure suddenly appeared out of the storm, this one looked younger but no less menacing and it too was accompanied by a dark human-sized silhouette, this one seemingly male.
The two giants conferred – something about being summoned and the number seven was all Chris was able to translate but their voices did have a sense of surprise about them. It was hard to focus on what was being said when your entire body felt frostbitten.
Did that mean someone or something had summoned seven of these creatures and what was the connection to the shadowy figures hovering at their heels?
Chris again attempted to piece together a coherent sentence from his online dictionary and asked, “Can you see the shadowy figures at their feet? Who are they?”
The first giant looked down and boomed something that Chris’s online dictionary translated as “Anchors”. As it spoke, the temperature around them dropped even further. It was now at least 25 or 30 degrees below and falling fast. Chris tried again “seen people, like us?” wondering if they had found and attacked their fellow students. He didn’t expect it to repeat its earlier reply, “akkeri”, anchors.
As he tried to make sense out of this, a third giant figure thundered into view and to their surprise immediately started shrinking down to human-size, absorbing its silhouette follower as it did so. Then a wave of intense cold emanated out in their direction as it decided that there had been enough talking. The blast immediately turned the snowdrifts into shards of ice that then shattered, peppering them both with dozens of sharp slivers. The temperature around the two boys dropped dramatically, stiffening their parkas momentarily solid but thankfully had no long-term effects.
Colin, Cadet, forced himself to move, shattering the ice on his jacket as he pulled out his bolos. His muscles ached as he twirled the bolos and unleashed it at the shrunken attacker and true to form they caught the miniaturised giant under the knees and brought him down hard.
In the distance, they could momentarily see through the snowfall five massive shadows struggling close to the Big House. Flashes of lights indicated that one of the giants had antennae which looked very familiar especially when he bellowing out, “Ow, you’re bloody freezing!” as he apparently forearm-smashed one of the other giant figures. An enlarged Whoop-Ant was obviously not alone in trying to defend the Mansion from attack. Flashes of lights from the ground seemed to indicate other heroes (teachers?) were in conflict with the other giants. That explained the ‘seven’ comment with an over-sized Whoop-Ant making eight.
Chris ‘sparked’ to heat them both up then unleashed a series of laser attacks at the three figures, starting with the ‘dwarf’ giant. He fired at the bolo-entangled figure intending to give them all a ‘hot foot’. The first blast seemed to shock and incapacitate the downed one.
No time to gloat, he turned and fired at the feet of the other two giants. Both shots hit but apparently did minimal damage. One benefit of his attack though was that the temperature warmed up slightly.
Well, two targets were better than three as the body on the ground seemed to be going unconscious and it looked as though was unmerging with the shadowy silhouette that was also becoming solid somehow. Chris smiled, “almost balmy, must be all that laser activity warming up the air.” Then seeing the transformation, he continued, “We’re quite the team, eh?”
Before he could say anything more another cold blast washed over them, this again reduced the temperature and left Cadet shaking and trembling with the intense cold. Again, Firewall ‘sparked’ warming himself up, but the intense cold in the air meant he was unable to help heat up Cadet.
He connected with the BFN interface of the red column again and quickly updated himself on what was happening over at the mansion. As he had suspected the teachers were keeping four other giants away from the underground Arc Reactor, which was somehow channelling temperatures at or close to absolute zero and that level of intense cold was spreading across the county. Whoop-Ant had increased his size to allow him to go ‘mano a mano’ with the giants but his blows, whist effective, left him suffering frostbite from his own assault though someone called Zero was somehow blocking and reversing their possession. However, they failed to say who or what they were possessing.
Next to him, Cadet was trying to think what sort of attack he could do that could possibly have an impact on the giant invaders. He looked up and for a few seconds the sky above him cleared showing a rainbow sparkle in the sky. Was that how they got here, through the dimensional breach above the school? Or via the reactor which was why it was suddenly channelling the ninth circle of hell?
Before he could do more than throw some flash pellets at the two remaining upright giants, he saw that the downed shrunken figure had completed its apparent transformation as a rainbow emanated out of the collapsed figure of one of girls in Firewall’s year, Aasim. She was a Muslim refugee from the Caliphates, a day-tripper attending from one of the suburbs of Wessex and not exactly popular with some though that was no fault of hers. As the shrunken giant vanished (banished?) he rushed over and removed his bolos from around her legs. Thankfully, she seemed to have no idea where she was or why she was there.
She seemed to be regaining consciousness despite Firewall threatening to slap her to help shock her awake. She was obviously suffering severe hypothermia as well as frostbite. The two boys were still unclear what her appearance and the giants’ corresponding disappearance actually meant but hoped it had to do with somehow their attack breaking the anchor, in this case Aasim, free of its icy bonds.
The remaining two giants again attacked with a winter blizzard that forced the three of them to huddle together against the wintery assault.
Cadet threw a handful of sleep pellets expertly into one of the giant’s faces; unfortunately it didn’t appear to do any real damage. Firewall momentarily struggled with whether to try and do a ‘Waco’. He remembered during the Waco Siege on the Branch Davidians by the U.S. Authorities in 1993 that tear gas rounds had turned incendiary and wondered what would happen if he were to erupt the pellets Cadet had thrown. Even assuming they were the same chemical compound as the Waco cartridges though, did he really want to risk a potentially lethal attack if a fellow pupil was this things ‘anchor’?
Instead, he again resorted to a round of laser shots at the two of them while Cadet attempted to get an otherwise uninjured Aasim onto her feet and heading back towards the relative safety of the school.
The first shot was aimed between the eyes and in the whiteout conditions, unfoprtunately missed. His second shot at the giant’s companion was targeted a little closer as he unleashed a laser blast at its ‘nuts’. That shot hit and had a definite reaction as it temporarily at least caused it to collapse in pain in front of the other while clutching his ‘family jewels’ and screaming in pain. At least that confirmed they shared a reproductive similarity to humans.
Taking advantage of the opportunity, the three students then turned and ran towards the school while Cadet tried to find out what had happened to Aasim while she had been possessed by the storm giant. Aasim’s memory of recent events however was completely blank; the last thing she remembered was going out with six of her classmates to see if they could find Lillie Ramsay who’d suddenly ran out of the class in distress and then, nothing. Had they by any chance found her?
The weather suddenly got worse and the temperature again dropped but despite that, they made it back to the shelter of the school. Unfortunately, a massive snowdrift blocked the way but this close to the main school Firewall could again access the teacher’s communications links. He ‘heard’ a shout from Whoop-Ant, which seemed to confirm that, “the generator seems to be bringing them through the breach…” Firewall screamed that they should “try turning it off and on again!” Then a hailstorm attack struck as the two giants got close enough to assault them (even if one of them was still limping badly).
The hailstones were the size of fists and the bombardment left the two boys bruised but otherwise unharmed, Aasim wasn’t so lucky and Cadet was forced to again pull out his cloak and hit the memory function to create a physical shelter for her from the icy barrage.
Unfortunately, the assault battered the school walls and doors and left a thick icy barricade up the sides and covering the entrances, icing them over almost completely. Firewall did mutter to Cadet, “Do we need to look for a new school do you think?”
Cadet didn’t reply as he tried to work out what to do next for the best; keep on fighting here and now or get inside..? Instead, he shouted at Firewall to get Aasim inside and pulling his Bo staff out, he extended it before splitting it into two halves and went to work on the back of the nearest giant’s knee with a vengeance with his Escrima sticks, carrying out a double attack on the muscles. It collapsed as the leg gave out and it was forced down to one knee.
Having lasered a way through the ice over the doors, Firewall again tried to access the teachers comm-channel through the BFN and was muttering that “Beaky” Hawke had just confirmed he’d also taken down another one of the giants assaulting the Big House but warned that others appeared to be coming through…
As Aasim ran deep inside the school and Firewall prepared to fire at their assaulters, he muttered “what’s the chance that the glittering sky means we get unicorns this time?” as he again tried to laser their already damaged feet sunk deep in the snow. The first shot obviously hit the previous wound and must have hurt as their attacker stopped his assault and he staggered backwards. No time for self-congratulations though, he again unleashed a second attack on their remaining attacker and was rewarded with screams of pain and a gazed look in its eyes.
Then the giant that had staggered backwards began to shrink in size as a rainbow beam headed into the glittering breach even as it collapsed into its accompanying silhouette, which seemed to solidify into another of Firewall’s classmates this time Lilly Chang. She immediately ran over but appeared to be in shock.
Again, following every bad 1950’s movie he’d ever seen, Firewall went to slap her out of her shock only for her to block his slap automatically and proceed to put his arm into a hold before realising what was happening and muttering “I’m fine.” Lilly again seemed to have no memory of what had happened to her and Firewall tried to urge her to get inside the school before the storm again blockaded the entrance.
Then a beam of energy lit up the sky, cutting through the storm before vanishing into a glittering tear in the sky above them. The beam was projecting a steady stream of ice and frost into the breach and was coming from the art room in what most students referred to as the turret or the attic… This was “Gypsy Rose” Hobbes’ classroom. Someone was up there and seemed to be summoning these ice elementals to come through and possess human bodies, making them corporeal.
The two boys turned to each other in realisation. If they went through the school it would take several minutes to get up there and who knew when the other giant would attack? Alternatively if one of them went up the outside of the school..?
Firewall took one look at the ice cliff that the storm had turned the outside of the school into and pointed to Cadet, “Think this is more your area of expertise than mine and after all you’ve got the artistic bent…”
Cadet smiled, how bad could this be? He grabbed for his grapple and fired it up at the roof then began climbing steady but consistently. The harsh wind was a constant reminder that a single mistake could mean his life. He climbed, trying without an ice axe to get a firm handhold in the fragile, deadly ice that coated the outside of the school. His feet slipped a couple of times forcing him to rely on his arms to haul himself up to the turret windows now covered in a thick coating of ice. Inside he could see a female-shaped ice sculpture moving around the room and screaming in terror and pain. This was the source of the icy projectile pouring into the sky and seemed to be some sort of Meta breakthrough in process… There was something about the transparent female inside the ice-covered room that looked familiar; he just couldn’t think who it might be for the moment.
Outside, Firewall was readying himself for another attack as their remaining opponent rushed forth from the storm. He unleashed a laser blast, this time at its chest. It hit and caused it to stagger back but this time he didn’t stop the attack. Sweating and near exhausted with the effort he kept up the attack hoping that he would be able to end this once and for all.
Above Cadet was forced to push himself away from the window and drop while swinging aside as the window he’d been looking through shattered and the shards of glass and ice cascaded down on the ground, narrowly missing Firewall who was still focused on attacking the remaining giant.
As he tried to pull himself back up again he heard the iced female shout that she couldn’t cope with the pain any more… That was a voice he recognised from Down Below; the voice of Icicle…
She’d been injured and subsequently healed by Viracocha’s Silver Storm on Zorandar. Could the genetic tampering have brought on a secondary breakthrough reinforcing and increasing her meta-abilities by an x-factor? That had to be something for Doctor Lockheart to decide, for now he had to stop her.
He had to risk getting her attention and that meant revealing that he already had worked out her identity, “Lillie, Lillie come back to us. You need to calm down.”
Down on the ground Firewall collapsed in exhaustion against the school doors, as he no longer had the energy to fire again. His attacks had driven the giant back into the snow storm so he had no idea other that the steam pouring from the continued blasts what damage, if any, his attacks had done.
Thankfully, the steaming figure that stepped into view was a very confused Sham – the giant had been banished leaving Shamus O’Reilly standing in the snow surrounded by steam from the recent laser assault. Above, Firewall could hear Cadet’s appeal to Lillie then the beam of ice into the sky stopped but the other ice giants were presumably still around?
He shouted up at a dangling Cadet, “You need a hand calming down the Popsicle?” Cadet shouted down, “You’ll need to climb up!” Firewall looked up at the school wall covered in thick ice, “Nope, I’m staying down here. Good luck.” After a few seconds, he reconsidered and tried to climb up the rope, but still exhausted from his earlier assault on Sham’s giant he quickly gave up when he realised how risky it would be for him to try to climb while so fatigued.
Meanwhile Cadet had clambered through the shattered art room window and was pleading with Lillie to come back to herself and not remain some uncontrollable ice woman. The personal contact seemed to be working as the ice around her slowly melted as she pulled the frost back into herself. He could hear Firewall shouting up, advising her to try controlling her breathing and remember their mindfulness training from their Down Below sessions. The panic attack seemed to pass and she seemed to again take control by absorbing the rest of the frost in the room back into herself.
Then out of the snowstorm, they saw Beaky Hawke approaching with several other dazed students struggling through the snow; Jade Borroughs, Rachel Izaaksi the powerless meta nicknamed Smiler, Kenneth St. Germain and the hippy child outsider, Gabriel (NEVER Gabby!) Freespirit in tow.
Beaky shouted to Firewall and Cadet, “You can stand down boys, the ah, Jötnar have departed back where they came, the backup generator seems to be working now and power should come on line anytime and I understand the breach closed when the ice spire was removed. Well done, though we may need to have words later about what you were doing outside on your own in the first place.” He then shouted up at Cadet, “How’s she doing?”
Cadet reached over as the ice figure began resuming Lillie’s human form again – a living breathing flesh and blood human once more. He handed her a paper bag and told her to breathe deeply into it. Then she began to gesture and the ice around her began to melt around the school leaving a watery mess behind in the school grounds as the storm departed. The sun shone and the lights and heaters came back on throughout the school as the Arc Reactor began working properly.
“You okay Icicle?” asked Cadet. “No, I’m not Icicle anymore; I think Permafrost is a better name for me now.” She muttered as she hugged herself, even as Old Man Summers rushed through the door with ‘Also’ Rhan.
Later that evening…
One of the London Watch team, Merina, was called in to help with the flooding throughout the school caused by the sudden thaw – she apparently could manipulate water and was able to speed up the drying out process though it apparently meant that all of the pupils would have a day off school tomorrow – a sort of after-snow day.
Emily Rafferty gave birth after several hours of labour to a bouncing baby boy called… Emil. Chris was actually upset that she hadn’t named the child after them. Frank Winchester survived and was transferred as soon as possible to Wessex Royal.
Mr Andrews caught up with them both that evening before bed and confidentially explained that the current theory was that ‘icicle’s’ meta-upgrading had been caused by her injuries on Zorandar, and subsequent repair by Viracocha, which seem to have resulted in her becoming an out-of-control ice-controller. As a result her secondary breakthrough had, somehow caused or allowed seven ice elementals from Jötunheimr to cross the Convergence and possess several students temporarily giving them ice powers and growth but at the same time causing them to suffer amnesia while it absorbed their physicality. The school was monitoring all of the students affected to make sure there was no after-effects.
Chris was just very aware that there was still no resolution of the broadcast blockade, which left him feeling like someone suffering withdrawal symptoms. He just hoped that someone resolved the issue and soon.
1 Aotearoa, this parallel Earth’s name for New Zealand.
This occurred at the same time as the Balance adventure Episode 57 – Call of the North
Growing up Meta, UK-Style! 