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Goon Squad “2014 Summer Special” containg “Meet the Goon Squad,” “Red Wolf, Red Wolf, Does Whatever a Red Wolf Can,” “Changes,” “No-No Dojo,” “Tale of Terror.”
by Jonathan L. Howard
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.
Copyright © 2014 Jonathan L. Howard
https://www.jonathanlhoward.com/
Cover Illustration by Bri Raymond
https://briraymond.daportfolio.com/
Welcome to the first GOON SQUAD Summer Special!
If the GOON SQUAD project proves successful, my intention is to write one of these little collections every year as a "Thank you" to regular readers and as a sampler for those new to the world of Manchester's Special Talents team.
The stories within it are a little different from the ongoing series in that they're self-contained tales that concentrate on the passing moments between the cases. Here you will find the little human stories of what can happen on patrol, how extraordinary Talents don't necessarily bring happiness, why Nadiya "Puppet Girl" Kysla found herself talking to a door in Salford one Sunday morning, and we dip into Ian "The Revenant" Mears' near bottomless reservoir of anecdotes.
Hope you enjoy the 2014 Summer Special!
JLH
Meet the GOON SQUAD
The Talented have been among us for centuries, but it was only during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as population density increased that Talents started to manifest in quite such profusion. The reasons for that are still poorly understood, but the effect was – as memorably described by Professor Richard Feynmann – to colour in outside the lines of causality.
It is to society's lasting regret that for a long time, all Talents were regarded with suspicion and frequently with outright hostility. Those times have thankfully passed, and those possessed of Talents are no more prejudiced against for them than, say, somebody with a talent for chess or sport.
It remains true that, while undoubtedly a boon to humanity in many ways, some of the Talented have chosen to misuse their remarkable abilities in the pursuit of wealth, power, or simply sadistic amusement at the cost of others. The best people to deal with such rogues was and is other Talents with better moral compasses.
While such interventions were once the domain of vigilantes, Manchester was the first city to recognise that it would be better if they were under the direction of the local police force. Indeed, it was a project of the city's first CID superintendent, the famous Jerome Caminada, to attach a group of handpicked civilian Talents to the police as a resource in investigations. "Caminada's Witches," as they were sometimes known in Manchester's underworld, had no powers of arrest, however, and were never to be used in dangerous situations. Instead, they provided information about crime scenes, "reading" impressions and otherwise invisible clues rather like the television series, "CSI: Salem."
The "Witches" group did not long survive Caminada's retirement in 1899, however, and use of Talents in police operations was very limited through the following decades. This was to change during World War II, when both Axis and Allies deployed Talents both on the battlefield and off.
One such project were the Special Talents Operations Team (shortened to the unglamourous acronym STOAT). These were small groups of Talented individuals who operated in tandem with Special Branch to maintain security in the UK. STOAT/6 was the team assigned to Manchester, comprised entirely of locals who knew the area and people. Despite being the sixth to be formed, they were the first deployed and were in action within a month, pursuing and mortally wounding what was at first believed to be a Fifth Columnist but who is now known to have been purely a serial killer, the Vivisector. The pursuit was partially in public, and all the "D" Notices in Whitehall couldn't stop people talking about the pitched battle between the Vivisector and the flame-throwing Corporal Crocodile amidst the Liberty ships docked at Salford Quays. The word was out, and the name "Goon Squad" was applied to STOAT/6 within a day or two.
Realising that the cat was out of the bag, the authorities instead publicised the STOATs across the country, allowing the local population to coin team names. Churchill's speech in which he called the STOAT members "lionhearted and stalwart," for example, led directly to London's own STOAT/1 being dubbed the "Lionhearts."
At the conclusion of the war, the Chief Constables petitioned central government to maintain their Talents teams; much of the STOATs work, it had transpired, was in dealing with threats that had nothing to do with the Axis, and their usefulness was too great to be easily dispensed with. Thus, the STOATs were handed over from MI5 to the local constabularies, and redubbed Special Talent Response Teams, sometimes referred to as "Spec Ts" or, rarely, "Spectres."
The Goon Squad has had many members in its seventy year existence. This is its current line-up.
The Revenant
Ian Mears is a former police constable turned private detective turned, via murder, into the undead, crime-fighting Revenant. His powers include feeling little pain, the ability to regenerate massive damage, and quite literally putting the fear of death in people. Acerbic and wilfully sarcastic, Ian is not the easiest person to get along with, but his comradeship is solid and he is more than prepared to die for his comrades. Several times over, if need be.
Talos
Talos is an armoured war-machine standing over two metres tall and vaguely themed on an ancient Grecian warrior in form. Its origin remains unknown, theories ranging from it being a weapon that found a conscience up to it being an automated guardian from some future time or alternative version of Earth. Talos can fly, is incredibly strong, and carries a daunting array of weapons. It's notable that the armour appears different in some respects since a bruising encounter with the "grandee" villain (i.e. one of international consequence), Lord Terror, some years ago, an indication of the terrible damage it suffered.
Red Wolf
Most of the time, Gilbert Sutton is a normal young man who could perhaps do with exercising a little more. For four hours in every twenty four, however, Gilbert can transform into the awe-inspiring Red Wolf. In this lycanthropic form, he towers over all but Talos, is astonishingly fast, agile, and strong, resistant to damage, and possessed of superior senses. The usual experience of observers is that Gilbert is considerate, intelligent, well-spoken, but a little underwhelming. As Red Wolf, he is frankly terrifying.
Puppet Girl
Nadiya Kysla is the newest member of the Squad. Of Ukrainian birth, her powers started to develop in her teens, along with a whitening of her skin but for dark patches around her eyes. Her appearance led to everyday acts of petty persecution, which in turn led to anomie and a hatred for "normal people." She was recruited by the notorious "art terrorism" gang known as The Mischief, and used her powers to disrupt and to bring fear. This changed, however, when her developing abilities caused her to empathically experience the terror she was causing. She disowned The Mischief and handed herself over to the authorities in the UK. Her rehabilitation is now marked as complete by her joining of Manchester's Special Talents Response Team, colloquially known as the Goon Squad. Nadiya's powers are psionic in nature, allowing her to directly interfere with the workings of her foes' brains.
Red Wolf, Red Wolf, Does Whatever a Red Wolf Can...
Manchester was not a convenient city to swing around in. Nor was any UK city, really; the British had no great desire to see their skylines turn into wannabe Manhattans
. Even the east of London, where foreign investors tried to out-phallic one another with new and splendidly inappropriate skyscrapers, was viewed with acidic disdain by the people who actually lived there.
Manchester had a handful of tall buildings, and only one – the Beetham Tower – could be regarded as a true skyscraper. Mancunians largely liked or at least tolerated it, mainly for its novelty value. There it stood by Deansgate, proud and alone as if thrust through from an alien dimension, emitting unearthly moans during high winds in a key of B below middle C.
Red Wolf had been on its roof once, attained after half an hour's heroic climbing for a charity event. He had posed majestically at the lip of the 168 metre drop for photographs, and then taken the
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