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LA Times’s Miko Nakadai accompanies young heroes to thwart Nightforce survivor Swansong
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Heather Hernandez
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The musical mystery that confounded LA’s boldest heroes for most of May was finally brought to a halt this week by an intrepid group of young vigilantes including heavy hitters Starbreaker and Hulkling, telekinetic newcomer Psych, and young clairvoyant Silvertongue, whose divination abilities reportedly guided the team to the source of the disturbance where all others had failed.

The LA Times’s own Miko Nakadai was on the scene alongside the intrepid teenage heroes to provide us with an exclusive first-hand account of the showdown, and we can reveal that the perpetrator of the musical plague was none other than Swansong, the last surviving member of the unregistered vigilante group Nightforce. As we reported in March, Swansong filed a missing persons report for the rest of her team after they disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Nightforce are today believed to have been victims of the possibly alien artificial intelligence that terrorised the city later in March with an army of cybernetically engineered animals.

Swansong, from a viral publicity photo shoot circulated late last year.

Swansong had apparently been hiding out in a warehouse on the edge of town, using her probability-manipulating song powers to effect the weeks-long citywide songfest – but there may be more to this story than the simple case of a mourning heroine letting her probability-manipulating euology get out of hand. According to Miko Nakadai’s exclusive eyewitness account of Swansong’s capture, the warehouse was encrusted with strange crystals of an unknown composition, which not only seemed to have rooted Swansong to the floor, but also attacked the young heroes who arrived to bring an end to her musical assault on the city.

Eyewitness accounts from Nakadai and the vigilantes likened the crystals to the still unidentified substance that was found in the aftermath of the two mysterious sinkholes that opened up in and around LA earlier this year, even going so far as to claim that they were attacked by ‘crystal creatures’ similar to the ones that were reported to ‘hatch’ from crystals retrieved from the UCLA sinkhole in March.


After Swansong herself was freed from the crystals binding her to the floor of the warehouse, though, every crystal in the building crumbled to dust. “Boom,” said Nakadai, describing the event. “It was like they were never even there.”

No trace of the substance has been found by investigators at the time of reporting, but the warehouse has been isolated for further study by CONDOR.

“Honestly I don’t know about this crystal story,” said one CONDOR representative, who asked to remain unnamed. “The stuff our guys have been studying from the sinkholes is harder than diamond, and these kids are talking about being able to punch through it – super strength or no super strength, they’d never manage that with the sinkhole crystals. We still haven’t found a trace of these supposed crystals anywhere in the area, either. Honestly, these kids are vigilantes, Swansong’s a vigilante – and everybody knows she was blaming CONDOR for what happened to her teammates. You want my opinion? They’re making something up to try to cover her back.”

After being freed Swansong fell silent and into what has been reported as a coma, and has yet to recover. The motives for her weeks-long attack on the city – if it can be called that – remain unknown.

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