FicWad

Legacy of the Phantom.


I write this in the memory of those who were brought to life by the cruel experiments performed upon them in the pursuit of so-called science, as a means to push the boundaries of the understanding of biology, and how the means do not always acquire the path to the end.

It began like any other day for David Walker, at the Malory Towers boarding school, in England, which has only just implemented a co-educational system that year, where both boys and girls attend the same school, but the dormitories for the boys are located on the opposite side of the school of the girls.

However, this hasn’t stopped David Walker from being close friends with the girls in the school, especially when one considers that there are only ten boys in the entire school, and only two of them are in the same grade as David is in.

Unfortunately for David, today is the day that he is going down to the town so that he can see a film with a group of friends. This is unfortunate because, while taking a shortcut through a part of town that they weren’t supposed to be in, the entire group was kidnapped. It was also unfortunate that it took the school until nightfall before they realised that something was wrong, and called the police, but it was too late. By noon the next day, the police followed the kidnapper’s trail all the way to London airport, and a private jet.

When David woke up, he found himself in a small, rather claustrophobic room that was made all the more so by the five very large, powerful men surrounding the fifteen year old boy. After putting up a show of resistance that somewhat impressed the men in the room, David quickly agreed to do what they wanted so that they wouldn’t hurt the girls. While he knew that he had no real guarantee that the girls wouldn’t be harmed, he could not afford to take the risk of gambling with their lives, as he sensed that the men were not lying when they said that they would kill one of the girls every time he refused to help them.

But what surprised David was when he found out that they want him to translate a document that is written in a number of ancient languages, including ancient Egyptian, ancient Greek, Sumerian, Mesopotamian, Latin, Etruscan and Norse runes, among others. The main problem is that nearly every sentence in the document is made up of at least two of the languages, which means that David has to figure out how the words all relate to one another.

While most people would be surprised to find out that a fifteen year old can read, write and translate over twenty ancient languages fluently, David can. This is due to the fact that David is a mutant, one who has the ability to memorise, retain and analyse large amounts of information at computer-like speeds, as well as having the innate ability to translate any language, written or spoken. However, this document is giving even David some troubles in the translating department, as a significant portion of the text is written in obscure dialects and languages that David hasn’t even seen before, despite the fact that his mother is one of the leading archaeologists and linguists in modern times and has passed on much of her knowledge onto him.

While David is spending all of his waking hours attempting to translate the baffling documents, and the five girls spend their time couped up in a small room with barely any privacy and three meals a day shoved through a flap in the door, with no communication with anyone outside their cell, the police are still trying to trace the aircraft that they believe was used to transport the kidnappers and their six victims.

Meanwhile, David’s father is conducting his own investigation into the kidnappings, which is proving to yield more information than the one conducted by the police, mainly due to the fact that he isn’t constrained by as many rules and regulations like the police are. According to the information that David’s father, who is far more commonly known as “the Phantom”, “the Ghost Who Walks”, or “the Man Who Cannot Die”, gained from the various crooks that he discovered in the course of his investigation, he found out that his son and friends were flown to an island located quite some distance off the coast of Bangalla, the ancestral home to the Walker family for over four hundred years.

After he provided the police in England the evidence that he discovered, the Phantom flew home to Bangalla and began an extensive search of the dozens of islands that are located along the Bangallan coastline. Using the resources that the Phantom line had built up in the area over the centuries, the Phantom called upon the jungle tribes to report any strange sightings to him, and he also used his position as the “Unknown Commander” of the Jungle Patrol to mobilise the Jungle Patrol into conducting their own search.

It was then that the hardest part of the search so far began, with the Phantom having to force himself to remain in the Skull Cave, home to the Phantom for over four and a half centuries, to await a report from either one of the jungle tribes or the Jungle Patrol to report to him any and all possible locations of the people that had kidnapped his son and friends.

Hours later, the Phantom received the first sighting of what might what he was looking for, between a report from the Jungle Patrol saying that an aircraft matching the description of the one that fled England had landed at the airport in Bangalla’s capital, but the owners of the aircraft already had a seaplane waiting for them and they had taken off again, all within half an hour of touching down. However, the Jungle Patrol also mentioned in their report to the Phantom, in his guise as the Unknown Commander of the Jungle Patrol, that the seaplane was reportedly travelling north and along the coast.

Not long after the Jungle Patrol was finished sending all of the information that the discovered to the Phantom’s Skull Cave, the first message from the Mori tribe came via the jungle drums. According to the message, the Mori saw a ‘flying boat’, a jungle term for a seaplane, acting suspiciously out near Kuwaney Island, an island that is forbidden by jungle lore for any of the tribes to go anywhere near the island.
Believing that this is his best lead so far, the Phantom leapt onto Thunder, his trusty horse that he uses as his main mode of transport on the Bangallan jungles, and rode hard to the section of coastline that is nearest to the forbidden isle of Kuwaney.

And so, a few hours later, the Phantom crept out of the water and onto the shore of Kuwaney island, hoping that this is not another false lead, as he had spent days investigating all sorts of false leads back in England, as the English police are continuing to, still, in their belief that the kidnappers may still be located, after having doubled back, somewhere in the British Isles, or, at worst, somewhere on the European continent.

Moving from shadow to shadow, the Phantom discovered signs that the island isn’t as deserted as everyone had thought it was, with a number of guards posted over the island, as well as clear indications that there are a number of structures located underground.

After knocking one of the guards unconscious, the Phantom disguised himself as a guard and managed to bluff his way inside the underground structure, where he discovered that the relatively simple kidnapping plot that he’d been expecting was far larger, and far more complicated, than he had ever expected, or anticipated.

Working his way to a security office, the Phantom accessed the security camera footage, quickly discovering that his son is being held in one section of the complex, while his friends are being held in another.

Leaving the room, the Phantom began to head towards his son, who just happens to be located fifteen levels below where the Phantom is currently located, and with his son’s school companions are being held prisoner two levels above where David is busily translating the ancient text that he is coerced into translating for the powerful figure of the criminal underworld.

And so, fifteen minutes later, father and son were reunited, at last, with the Phantom wanting to rescue the girls, but David has another idea.

“No, wait a minute, Dad. There are others here, besides my friends, that need to be rescued,” David told his father.

“What do you means exactly, by others?” asked the Phantom, rather warily and rightly so.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Dad. In this case, seeing is believing. And believe me, they don’t deserve to be treated in this fashion, despite what they look like,” said the younger Walker.

Five minutes later, father and son found themselves in the holding area that is attached to the complexes bio-engineering laboratories, where all of the bio-engineered lifeforms that survived to this stage found themselves in, where they stay until they are needed for further testing.
After talking with some of the imprisoned bio-engineered lifeforms, the Phantom decided to take a risk in releasing all of them, and to give them all a new home where they can live in peace, if they so desired it.

One side effect in the Phantom’s decision to release all of the imprisoned creatures was that he gained a readymade army, for the people who had ordered the creation of these creatures, had modern day combat techniques and weapons systems directly imprinted into their brains, for they had every intention in the world to make these creatures serve as the bulk of their forces in their plans to conquer the planet. This gave a number of the creatures an ability to interface with the various systems throughout the base, which aided the main group of the Phantom, his son and ten of a most unlikely group of freedom fighters in their goal of reaching, and freeing, the five girls.

Meanwhile, the other creatures that were freed from imprisonment all went in different directions, some with the intention of maximisation of harm, death and destruction to the base and their, in their eyes and the eyes of many others, tormentors, and others with the purpose to direct attention away from the main group.

By the time the girls had been freed, all five rather stunned at the violence that had exploded all around them, and pretty wary of ten of their rescuers, alarms were sounding throughout the base. The reason for these alarms were discovered when they left the area where the girls were held, with the group quickly discovering dead and wounded all over the place.

Moving quickly, the Phantom led his group to the surface, where they met up with about forty of the others at the boats. After some arguing, the Phantom took the entire group to the Deep Woods, where they all fell asleep and slept until the sun was well up in the sky the next day.

After the Phantom had taken the six students to the Jungle Patrol headquarters, where the Patrol started arrangements to send them back to England, the Phantom went back to the Deep Woods where, upon nightfall, he took the group of bio-engineered creatures, many of whom were designed as, and in some cases disposable, super-soldiers, to the island of Eden.

This island is a place of peace that was founded in the 1840’s, by the Phantom, my ancestor, of the time. The island of Eden, often referred simply as Eden by family members and other people who are privy to Eden’s existence, is a place where various creatures from the mainland are raised in peace and security, free from the demands of the kill or be killed world of the mainland. On Eden, predators such as, among others, lions and tigers, with Bangalla being the only country in the world having a large population of lions and tigers co-existing in large numbers in the wild, living side by side with their natural prey, in the form of antelope, gazelle and wildebeest, without bloodshed. This is due to the Phantom’s rigorous training of the offspring of the various meat eating species to have an aversion of spilled blood, and to eat the plentiful supply of fish that is located in the island’s lake, a supply of which is stocked up daily by the Mori tribe of fishermen, who are friends of the Phantom, as are much of the jungle tribes.

However, on the other side of the world, the group of six students that had been kidnapped some months before have now, by and large, gone their own way, mainly due to the fact that they weren’t a group that really did things together and that they had only gone down to the town that one day as a group was because they all same movie at the same time. Also, many of them simply wanted to forget about that experience and they found that to be hard enough by seeing the others in the group on a daily basis, but even harder to do when they were talking to others from that group.

High school is tough, more so when you attend a boarding school and there is no way that you can escape your fellow students by going home at the end of the day, or simply skipping school for a few days like what can happen in day schools. As a result, students at boarding schools have to ‘tough’ it out if things get a bit rough between two or more students, particularly if they have superhuman abilities like many students at Malory Towers do.

In such a situation, one has to do something pretty remarkable to stand out amongst the crowd, and is seems that David has found just the means to do so. There are plenty of rumours being passed around the school at, at least it appears so to many people, near light speed, about the reason why David and the others were kidnapped was because the kidnappers needed David to do something for them. Other rumours about David include the so called fact that he isn’t fully human, and also include a few that involve him beating both the Hulk and Superman, and other similarly powered heroes and villains, all in one day.