witch's cape, not hat

[characterquarry]

Grendyne groans and starts pulling on her boots when the alarm goes off. Again. She quick-marches to the broom hangar, sits on her machine and is handed a plethora of loaded weapons by attentive corporals.

"Two flyers in one day? They're getting way too common."

"It's worse," the commander informs them, "South Karlsland got hit with three at once. We're taking Lytee's express and sleeping there. You can sit out if you absolutely need to, but Freya's still recovering so we could use you as a comms relay."

"No, I'll come. I just reserve the right to complain about it."

The 42nd United Forces Witch Wing takes off and assembles into a perfect synchronized formation as Lytee charges her teleport power.



...This is not South Karlsland wilderness.

[note: halfway through this thread I created a unique account for Grendyne. Do not be alarmed by the change in account. -Rockeye]

Comments

[wormcan]

She'll have to land a touch on him first. The acid spit can be avoided easily enough by coming from behind, but his too-many legs are swiping at any fliers that get near touch range.

And a voice calls out, carrying surprisingly well over the noise. "Copycat! I've got something here you'll want to see!"
Bonesaw is flanked by some of her creations and surrounded by what is unmistakably a Witch shield.

[witchwatcher]

"Oh bloody hell."

Priorities. Crawler is holding a huge chunk of their forces up. She ignores Bonesaw and her Witch for now, channeling Alexandria despite the relatively astronomical mana cost to fly close enough to tap him with the deathtouch. And Clockblocker's power, if that doesn't work.

[whole_new_can]

The death touch works. Crawler can regenerate from anything, but not if he's dead. As soon as Crawler goes limp Armsmaster disintegrates a piece of the monster, and it doesn't grow back.
Myrddin flies off to help stop all nearby fires, presumably to find or slow down Burnscar.

While Gren was busy with Crawler, the other newcomers noticed that half the heroes have been fighting the other half. They're fighting to kill, and the Nine are enjoying the distraction. Legend has been identifying the berserk allies and stunning them, and Usher's current protectee is of course immune, as is apparently Dispatch for some reason. But knocking out one's teammates is not a long-term winning strategy.

"Kill the shield and get out!" Legend blasts the Witch's shield, his laser fizzling against it. Then he rockets upward, having felt the effects of whatever's making the capes do this himself.

[witchwatcher]

Copycat sends her copy of the Siberian through the shield and into the former Witch making it. Bonesaw has her, whoever she was is gone. Copysiberian attacks bonesaw too for good measure. She might be a bit too slow flying up after this.

[wormcan]

In this as in most things, the Siberian is overkill. It breaks the shield, and sticks a fist through the Witch and the cape.

And then the shield goes back up. "Ow!" comes Bonesaw's voice. Large chunks of both girls are missing where the Siberian deleted pieces, but they both seem alive. "Don't you want to know how I did it?"

The ex-Witch opens fire. At everyone, Copycat most definitely included. The shield blocked everything to some upper limit between Legend and the Siberian, and the blasts are proportionately strong.
And to make things worse, now it's nearly all the heroes in a mindless rage. Some of the fliers, Legend included, are high enough that they don't seem to be affected, but the vast majority are turning on each other. Gren can feel it too. Hatred of everyone she came with, anger and the desire to destroy...it's definitely a Master power doing this, but that hardly seems important.

[witchwatcher]

Copycat's own shield has less raw power, but it's more efficient. She's approaching the point of mana burn now, though.

When the rage builds up to a certain point, something snaps. Cranial's implant. She goes completely emotionless. Lack of disgust over blood and gore, and lack of morbid curiosity over how she made a Witch so obscenely powerful makes it a lot easier to have the Copysiberian systematically disassemble Bonesaw and her Witch.

It's a bit creepy to be so calm when all this is happening. Who here smells like an emotion manipulator? That way. She ignores the mounting pain of mana burn to teleport over to her and apply the deathtouch for the third time in less than two minutes.

And then she really does need to take a break, because ow. "Bonesaw down, new member the Master down. Is Dispatch available?"

[whole_new_can]

Dispatch has been running from cape to cape while under the master's influence, and taking them down nonlethally. Jack Slash killed him on the grounds that this wasn't any fun.

Shatterbird and Mannequin are dead. Burnscar is dead or fled, no one knows which. Jack spent an awful long time dodging and killing before finally being cornered, and is now also dead. The new member was the last one.

[witchwatcher]

Okay. So now it's a good time to drop out of combat mode and brace herself to come down from mana burn. Trying to heal herself would be... Counterproductive. She sits in the alley shaking for a while, grunting in pain. It's probably pretty incongruous to bystanders and passersby, if there are any.

[wormcan]

There aren't, they cleared the area before calling in the artillery. If medical or parahuman healing would help, there's likely some of that available. Though this might not make the top of their priority list.

[witchwatcher]

Mana burn has never been any kind of pleasant, and it's suspected that it contributes to Witches losing their mana early, so it's probably doing terrible things to her body.

But once it starts to subside, Cranial's implant has shut itself down too, and she can feel proud that the Nine are now either One or None.

She radios in her perspective on the fight, then teleports home to Terra and has a couple of days off. After that, Cranial receives a message saying that her implant helped against the Nine and ten thousand dollars as a your-stuff-worked-in-live-fire-conditions bonus.

Toy Soldier, how about that spacesuit?

[wormcan]

Toy Soldier can definitely make her a space suit. Surviving in vacuum, radiation, sudden temperature changes...those are all easy enough. Cheaper than the brain implants unless she wants it to also be a weapon in its own right, and should be done in a couple weeks.

[witchwatcher]

No, she just wants it to survive space. She is a weapon.

[wormcan]

Then in short(er) order she'll have a space suit.

They make the transaction in costume, of course. For Toy Soldier this means a three-story powersuit; presumably the cape themself is in there somewhere.

[witchwatcher]

Copycat is not the least bit intimidated. She helped against the Nine. Not that she's getting too proud of herself, but she probably made the difference between victory and defeat. She hovers at head height to hand over the briefcase of cash.

[wormcan]

"PLEASURE DOING BUSINESS WITH YOU," the giant squeaks.

The space suit is pretty much exactly as advertised: a space suit. It gets handed when the money does.

[witchwatcher]

She solicits instructions on how to use it.

Then she teleports to the moon - it's a stretch, but she has more than enough mana lately - and jumps around for a while and takes a video and publishes it on the internet and bags a few samples of interesting-seeming rocks and dust in case scientists might want them and teleports back to Earth Bet and resumes heroing.

(Mars and various other celestial bodies are apparently a bit too far, she tells inquiring parties.)

[wormcan]

She now has her escape route in case of Neuroi. Success.

[witchwatcher]

...You know what, she helped against one S-class threat. Are there any more that could use some Copysiberianing, and that she might have a good shot against?

[wormcan]

Some. Her PRT contact warns her that while she could kill Nilbog easily enough, this is a terrible idea. She's not the only one who could kill Nilbog, and Protectorate precogs reliably predict that trying it ends badly. The man behind Ellisburg is smart enough to set up deadman switches.

For other threats on that level she'd have to go further afield. The Three Blasphemies can probably be destroyed, but they'd have a good chance at surviving and it's unsafe to have them alive around you.

Copycat should stay very far away from Sleeper.

Ash Beast? He's on a lower scale because he's slow enough to just evacuate when necessary, but is dangerous enough that it's sometimes necessary. He's also, as far as anyone knows, just an innocent person with a really unfortunate power.

[witchwatcher]

She'd rather not try to take on the Blasphemies without a clear strategy.

Back to rouging it up, then. She doesn't really need all the money she's earning from healing hundreds of people per hour, messing with inconvenient geography or geology, and everything else. And she's not going to run out of magic anymore, so she buys a few ostentatiously golden and gemstoned things, and the rest goes to various charities she judges most worthy, weighted towards peacekeeping and refugee aid types of programs.

And time passes.

[neuroihive]

(The Centauri system slowly dims, then goes out completely, over Earth Gimel.)

[wormcan]

Over the next three months, Earth Bet continues preparing for war. They know they're facing an Endbringer fight without Eidolon, and they know all the lesser capes will have to step up to compensate.

Over the next month, they notice an unmistakable lack of Endbringer fight. Late is one thing; the Endbringers were never exactly predictable. But it hasn't been this long between attacks since when there were only two of them. Optimists start to hope that the war might have stopped. But the Simurgh is still flying around copying tinkers at unpredictable intervals, constantly upgrading whatever it is she's doing, so optimists are few and far between.

[neuroihive]

During all this the Neuroi have been making their own preparations. They were going to use Scion to find his planet.

Some of the pieces of Scion (and not-Scion-but-similar) are in dimensions that won't immediately attract his attention. The Neuroi carefully figure out which are which, then warp there and begin to study and copy them.

They finish consuming the Centauri system, and organizing a flotilla of drones just barely smart enough to come out of FTL not completely disoriented and deploy their superweapons. Then they open a door to Contessa. "We are ready."

[whole_new_can]

"Good. We'll—"

The ground shakes around them, and walls between worlds fall. Contessa and the Neuroi find themselves in one of Cauldron's more secret locations, in by the area they mine for the powers they sell. A gray-skinned humanoid hangs slack-jawed and dead, surrounded by similarly gray limbs and faces.

[wormcan]

Another crash between dimensions, and the entire scene appears in front of Scion. What he sees is the body of his counterpart, both its real body and the partially completed avatar that was to be shown to the world) along with the woman who killed her. He sees the human and her allies conspiring to kill him.

He doesn't have feelings, in the human sense. He does have a role, and he is familiar with the narratives the host species uses. One of the roles of the Warrior is revenge.

Under other circumstances an unplanned meeting with a different species might be interesting. Instead, he raises a hand to blast the nearest Neuroi from existence.