B-Team: Fright Knight

Expedition

After attending a press conference to announce the release of Ghost from hospital, The B-Team are asked to check in on an old acquaintance of the hero's in order to investigate an unusual letter that warns them that a young girl may be in serious danger.

It's a sunny Saturday in Bathala City, and with Dr Jeremy Black being discharged from Bathala City General Hospital, members from the various Vigil-associated hero teams have been asked to attend a press conference to show their support for their colleague and friend. There is a small stage set up out the front of the building, and several members of the liberal media have gathered for the occasion, including Michelle Van Quinn, who makes a beeline for Rue and asks them for intel. Disappointed when Rue refuses to provide anything, she disappears into the crowd just as Ghost is wheeled into the room, accompanied by Suplex, Brainiac, and Transonic.   Kelly points Warp towards the front row, where it appears seating has been reserved for the heroes. She quietly whispers ‘oh my god’ when she inadvertently ends up seated next to Mercy, a blush creeping up her cheeks. Rachel waves at the team and joins the people in the front row together with Transonic, leaving only Ghost and Brainiac on the stage.   Ghost, seemingly in good spirits, addresses the press and thanks them all for coming. He assures everyone that he is on track to make a full recovery before he takes a moment to thank the members of the The B-Team for their assistance and for getting him out of the rubble.   He takes a moment to thank anyone who has sent him well wishes or any other fan mail, then announces that he will take this time off to not only recuperate, but to finally go on his honeymoon. He emphasises his faith in the B-Team to hold down the fort until the Vigil is ready to get back into the saddle. There is a brief Q&A session during which Michelle van Quinn bombards him with questions before the conference is called to an end.   As the crowds start to disperse, however, there is a telepathic message from Brainiac to the heroes, asking them to meet with her and Ghost. The team slowly make their way to the backstage area and speak with the pair, with Jeremy telling them about a particularly worrying letter he received while convalescing. He hands it over to them to read:   Dear Doctor Black, I am writing to you today because, within my household, yours is a name that carries both respect and a reputation for heroism, and I am in dire need of someone with your character. My dear charge, Violet, has found herself in great danger and my own attempts to quell the threat have proven ineffective. It seems that none around her can see the danger, and so I’ve been forced to seek outside assistance. I’m sorry that I won’t be able to share my identity with you until we meet in person, but I hope you’ll understand that an abundance of caution is required when the safety of a child is at stake. Please make your way, as soon as you are able, to 17 Aschcroft Road, Bathala, and help me rescue Violet from a terrible fate. I know you won’t disappoint. Deepest respect, N.K.   He explains that the address in the letter belongs to Edgar Wainwright, better known as The Toymaker, a reformed villain. Ghost explains how the man got his act together after getting caught, paid back his debt to society and got back together with his wife and their daughter Violet. Needing no further explanation with the safety of a child at stake, the team agrees to look into the matter and leaves for the Warpmobile.   Whilst Zero and Mercy go off on a tangent about languages, each of them showing off their respective skills and knowledge, Rue receives a text from Brainiac, who caught on to the fact that they were keeping their distance from her and asks why. Rue alludes to their previous meeting  , saying that because of the unpleasant effect she has on spirits, Rue has simply decided to keep their distance for now.   Warp drives them to the suburbs, where they find a picturesque but modest house with a small garden and the number 17 elegantly engraved upon the wooden front door. There is a distinct smell of wood dust permeating their surroundings, with Rue spotting the woodworking space inside the garage.   Led by Mercy, the team knocks on the front door, and moments later an older looking gentleman opens it. He appears to be in his early fifties and is fairly tall and harmless looking, wearing a nice shirt with a bowtie and suspenders. Mercy asks the man if someone with the initials ‘N.K.’ lives at the premises, but gets told that the only people living there are the man himself, his wife Angela, brother Jack, and daughter Violet.   Much to the confusion of the man, Mercy ushers the team away from the door, seemingly to regroup, when Rue decides on a more head-on approach and shows the Toymaker the letter, explaining that they’re there to investigate the matter. Concerned for his daughter’s safety, Mr. Wainwright agrees to let the team inside to speak to Violet, though Zero opts to remain on guard outside, just in case.   Once inside, Mercy, Rue and Warp ask the Toymaker a few more questions about him and his family. When asked by Warp if he has many enemies, he reveals that Ghost caught him fairly quickly, and that during the few robberies that he’d committed he’d never worked with an accomplice. He’d worked hard to make up for his crimes, so the likelihood of someone from his past retaliating now seems unlikely.   With Mercy arguing that children are usually afraid of him and Warp convinced that Rue is better with children, Rue reluctantly leads them up the stairs towards the first door on the left. There is a small sign on the door saying ‘Violet’, and Rue knocks and waits for the seven-year-old girl to permit them inside.   The young girl is a little shy around the three heroes, but she says she recognises them from the TV, and after a little while she opens up to them about some bad dreams she’s been having. Rue sympathises with the girl, saying that whenever they have a bad dream, it can help to write it down. Violet shows Rue some drawings that she’s made about the nightmares, the pictures depicting a large snake as well as a pillar with hands coming out of it.   Whilst Rue momentarily dons the spectral spectacles to have a look around the room, Mercy says he’s going to head back downstairs to speak to the father. As he leaves the room, however, his attention is drawn in the opposite direction. Rue picks up on a rustling noise out in the hallway and calls over to the vampire, but receives no response. They try to speak to Zero, who should be able to hear them despite being outside, but again they’re met with silence.   At this stage, they assure Violet that they’ll be right back, and together with Warp they go out into the hallway, where they find a small teddy bear and what looks to be a voodoo doll wearing a strange amulet. There is a blinding flash of light before the heroes lose consciousness.   After some time, Mercy is the first of them to wake up, noticing right away that there’s something very much not right. His movements feel strangely rigid, and as he looks down at his C-shaped hands, he realises with horror that he has been changed into a nondescript plastic figurine. One by one, the other heroes awaken to find themselves transformed into various toys: Rue a wooden puppet on strings, Zero an action figure, and Warp a plush doll.   They look around themselves, finding that they’ve been brought up to the attic of the house, and sat before them are the same teddy bear and voodoo doll that they spotted in the hallway. The teddy bear, much to their surprise, begins to speak, introducing himself as Night Knight, and the voodoo doll as Tatterdalia. Whilst Tatterdalia watches them mutely, Night Knight admits to sending the letter to Ghost, guiding them around some boxes and saying that ‘’Only toys can be of use in this matter - Chip will be able to explain things better’’.   The team is quickly introduced to Chip, an old west-themed ventriloquist's dummy who’s clearly seen better days. He begins to explain that Violet’s nightmares are becoming a big issue for them, as being creatures borne of a child's imagination, these fears have manifested themselves as creatures they call "fear forms" which pose a very real hazard to them and any other toys within the house. Chip furthermore explains that they cannot interact with humans as their reality is based on perception. Once a human sees them and perceives them a monster, they will become one, alluding to a few cases in their history where that very thing had happened.   The toyified heroes reluctantly agree to help to fight off some of the fear forms, such as the Tumble Geist and the Tattered Serpent, as well as the rats in the walls, in order to return the status quo. As they follow Night Knight into the walls, they can hear the telltale scratching of rats up ahead, the rodents lurking in the shadows. Zero transforms into a rat, and despite the fact that he currently looks like a plastic toy, he successfully manages to communicate with the pair before him.   Upon transforming, Zero can hear the rats chanting ‘food, food, food, food’. As they turn towards the group, seeing the soft and delicate form of Warp, the rats, in unison, say ‘Nest'. What follows is a discussion about offspring and broods and keeping warm, as Zero tries to explain that the scratching noises are frightening the child that Night Knight and his friends are protecting. The rats eventually agree to take the group to see their queen, and so they are ushered down towards the basement, past the washing machine which is seemingly cloaked in a shadowy haze.   A little further down, the group comes face to face with the rats’ nest, and in the centre is a colossal rat that easily towers over the toys - the Queen, also shrouded in shadows. Zero guides them forward and mirrors the other rats’ curtsey: a bow and bum wiggle. In order to appease the queen, the whole team bows and does the same, with Rue finding that they have a surprising affinity for it.   The Queen negotiates with Zero, the two of them going back and forth as to who should leave the house. The Queen argues that many generations of their brood have lived within these walls, and that the ‘other creatures’ are the ones causing harm. Zero instead offers to take the rats somewhere else, promising warmth and safety that they will not be able to get if they stay. The queen decides to trust his word, and they strike a deal that the rats will steer clear of the rest of the house for a few days whilst Zero works on getting them to their new home. As this pact is made, the shadows around the rats seem to fade, the Queen shrinking significantly as the fear aura dissipates from her body.   It is at this stage that Lady Ermyntrude, a princess doll, feels it’s finally safe for her to come out of hiding. She thanks the heroes for their help and starts heading up towards the attic to be protected by Chip. Meanwhile, the heroes turn their attention towards the next challenge, and watch as a rat gets sucked into a gaping black hole in the washing machine, courtesy of the Tumble Geist. While Zero and Warp work hard to open the fuse box to switch off the power, Mercy and Rue battle with the appliance. Shadows try to reach them, but Rue wards them off with a fire wall. Warp and Zero successfully break the lock off the fuse box and flip the switch, and the machine, though weakened, turns its attacks on them and sucks Warp into the vortex, at which point he deals it a finishing blow by throwing the lock in too, causing havock with the machine's internals and rendering the Tumble Ghiest broken.   Warp and what is left of the rat are flung out of the black hole, and Mercy, much to Warp’s dismay, tells him to ‘’Get up, Cuddles.’’. After singing their praises, Night Knight ushers the team up towards Violet’s bedroom, but on the way, the toys stumble across the mad Doctor Toxicus, an action figure based on the short-lived Vigil TV show. The villain has a woman in an army uniform held hostage, and Mercy gets glued down to the floor as he tries to intervene.   The team considers how best to talk down the toy, with Night Knight explaining that he's not a bad person, but being a supervillain figurine, his will had been worn down by the perception of himself as a bad guy. The doctor is suddenly pulled away however, by a set of inky black tendrils, at which point Night Knight urges us all to run. Rue quickly frees Mercy and they get away unscathed, helping Action Jan escape unlike Doctor Toxicus, who Rue sees getting swallowed whole with a series of sickening crunching noises by the tendrils coming out of a broken ginger cat hot water bottle.   Night Knight explains that Ginger, as he's soon identified, was part of his defense team, but was seen by Violet during one of their missions and as a result of her seeing the animated toy as some sort of monster, underwent a hideous and painful transformation that resulted in the abomination they had just narrowly escaped. He alludes to a pink teddy bear called Hugmuffin that had apparently suffered a similar fate, though it somehow managed to stave off some of the corruption and now lives a life of solitude in the garage.   Making it inside the bedroom, a ferocious but near-silent battle is ongoing between Stanley, a penguin plushie and veteran of the defense team, and a gargantuan (as compared to them) shadow-wreathed cylinder of scarves and other fabrics: The Tattered Serpent. While Violet is fast asleep in her bed, Stanley has been fighting beak and nail against the creature, in defense of the Babakovs - a family of Russian nesting dolls, and as the heroes arrive, it appears he's on his last legs, stuffing emerging from several cuts across his body.   Mercy flies in and fights the serpent while Warp protects the Russian dolls by, in a stroke of madness, using a Russian accent and asking them to stack together so Stanley can carry them to safety. A silent, yet intense battle follows, with Zero eventually finishing off the serpent with a shark bite, ripping away pieces of clothing. Their moment of victory is short-lived however, as the ruckus causes Violet to stir in her bed. The team is forced to quickly ‘go limp’, adhering to the rules of perception for toys and, thankfully, the young girl doesn’t seem to notice anything so, after getting comfortable again, she quickly goes back to sleep.   The danger quickly ramps back up, however, when a slamming noise alerts them of the arrival of Ginger to the bedroom, his black tendrils slinking their way out from the same hole in the wall that they'd emerged from. Night Knight points them towards the window, urging them to escape through there, but warn them that they'll have to deal with ‘The Many-Armed One’ next.   The team climbs out onto the window ledge and see the darkened branches and leaves of the Wainwright residence's oak tree, shrouded in shadows like the other fearforms. Hands made of shadow and possessed of vicious intent begin to claw and grab at the heroes, but it seems the Many-Armed One had not considered the one weakness that all trees face.   As Rue engulfs the tree in flame, the team are able to make their way up to the roof and towards the chimney, Night Knight explaining that there's a direct route back to the attic from there, and they make their way down, keeping an eye out for any shadow-wreathed spiders as they go.   It is eerily quiet when the heroes descend back into the attic. Looking for the toys they just rescued, the team discovers that the boxes in the attic are packed with a variety of toys, some of them dating as far back as the 70s. When they stumble across the unmoving Lady Ermyntrude, it becomes dreadfully apparent that Chip has been doing something deeply untoward up in the attic.   They soon find the maligned dummy leering over the unconscious forms of Stanley and the Babokov family, his face contorted in a gluttonous fervor. As they interrupt his feasting, Chip expresses his rage at their early return and explains that, in order to keep his life sustained without the nourishing force of imagination that he lost when put away, he'd resorted to draining other toys of their very essence. It becomes apparent that he'd been the one exasperating Violet's nightmares, whispering to her in her sleep via a hatch in the ceiling of her room. He'd planned to cultivate her fear and eventually direct it towards Jack, her uncle and Chip's once friend, turning him into a fear form that Night Knight, in his zeal and obsession, would eventually find himself compelled to destroy.   A battle ensues between the team and Chip, with Mercy stabbing him in one of his large, wooden eyes. Wounded, and seeing that he's outmatched, Chip does the unthinkable. He opens the hatch down to Violet's room and falls bodily down to the floor below with a clatter that startles the girl awake. Chip drags himself up to the foot of her breath and laughs at her fear as he feels the tendrils of black matter emerging from his mouth and wrapping around his own face.   Night Knight flies to the defence of his dear charge, diving down the hatch after Chip and plunging his sword into the dummy's back with a primal roar. He's quickly knocked aside and calls out to Violet as she shrieks and bolts out of her bed and into the bathroom. The bear feels the transformation beginning to take him, and stands, trusting the heroes to deal with Chip as he rushes after Violet, knowing he has only one chance to save himself.   Mercy, Warp, Rue and Zero continue to battle with the dummy, his transformation taking him over as his wicked laughter turns to screeches of animalistic malice, but it is Zero actually snaking his way inside the toy through the stab wound Night Knight inflicted and morphing into a large enough animal to blow him up from the inside out that puts an end to Chip’s rampage.   With the battle over and the magic of their transformation beginning to wane, the team suddenly start to feel themselves returning to their true forms, catching a final glimpse of Tatterdalia waving goodbye to them and smiling before she disappears into the attic. Through the walls, Rue can see Violet clutching her precious teddy to her chest, her perception of him remaining intact and the pair of them successfully saving him from turning into a monster.   Knowing that their work is done, the heroes quickly and noiselessly, sneak out of the house, confident in the knowledge that Violet is protected, and that Night Knight, and the rest of the rescued toys might finally be able to live in peace.