Mountain, meet Endbringer

[sturdycoldsteel]

The Fate who calls herself Mountain tried to convince some of her neighbors to allow the occasional mountain in their lands, for stability purposes.

"I meant no insult!" Dodge ball of lava. "I don't intend to interfere, you said no!" Dodge house-sized spear of ice. "I'm leaving peacefully, okay, so stop tearing up the tile!"

"You'll respawn at home. No permanent damage. You interrupted an important meeting, you need to learn a lesson about territory, mountain bitch." Dodge- no, fail to dodge a thrown tree, and then another ice ball. The next sphere of magma is what destroyed that form.




She wakes up, stripped of all her tools and enchantments and even clothes, and groans in pain.

Comments

[sturdycoldsteel]

"It's metal. I stopped it. Could've crushed it flat, but that's mean. It should be able to move again now."

[mxglam]

It moves one leg a bit. "Cool! You got metal powers?"

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Not metal. Rock, and things that come from rock. You a tinker?"

[mxglam]

"That too," they say, dismissively. "Name's Glam. They pronouns, please."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"They is a pronoun? ...Guess it is. English." She shakes her head. "She for me since you said that. Are you planning to do anything unpleasant or destructive? I've got nothing against big robots, just stealing and killing and so on."

[mxglam]

"No killing. Some stealing. Some scaring people. I'll definitely not hurt anyone who doesn't try to hurt me."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Better than I thought but not great. Why even steal? You can obviously make stuff. Someone would buy a giant robot... Wait, that annoying approval process."

[mxglam]

"Yeah," they agree. "Plus some other complicated stuff. As for the stealing, it's mostly for the attention. The robot, too. I wouldn't really use a giant robot if I wanted to be subtle about it."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"You can get attention doing flashy stunts in central park or shows and gifts for childrens' hospitals if that's all you actually want. Why get attention in such a negative way?"

She's genuinely curious, it's not a preachy question expecting a response she can use against them.

[mxglam]

"That's also difficult and kinda dangerous to explain."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"How annoying. If you won't stop or explain why, I'll have to stop you. Not that I don't like you, it's just how it is."

[mxglam]

"I know. But that's okay. Fighting a new hero also satisfies the mysterious unexplained things. What's your cape name, by the way? And why aren't you calling the rest of your team?"

[sturdycoldsteel]

"I'm Mountain. I don't have a team, I'm just here 'cause they hired me to fix some of what Behemoth broke. But it's not like you can beat me. I punched Leviathan in the face, you know."

[mxglam]

"Ooh, that's cool. I made a gun that burned Leviathan, though, so I think I'm still better!"

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Those two things are just stupidly tough, and even diamond is only so hard. Maybe at the next fight can you make me something hard enough to actually hurt them."

[mxglam]

"Yeah! That's a good idea. We could work together on the next fight, if you want."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Sounds good... I still have to stop you for now unless you want to stop stealing things, though."

[mxglam]

"I'll stop stealing things if you take enough of my time stopping me from stealing things that I deem it Worth It."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"You can fly, right?"

[mxglam]

"...well, I wasn't planning to, today that wasn't on my powerset list, but yes, in general it is an ability I possess."

[sturdycoldsteel]

She detaches her hammer from her back and starts lazily swinging it in circles.

The robot is steadily forced 'to its knees' as in folded down on the ground.

(She tries to use her earthsense to peer into its inner working if it starts resisting this.)

[mxglam]

It does try to resist it!

...and then it disappears. Glam is left floating there.

"Aww, look what you did!" They make a techy-looking gun appear. "How resistant are those rocks to damage, by the way?"

[sturdycoldsteel]

"They're just granite and ruby and diamond and so on. But I'm pretty tough by myself too. Plus I'm holding them right now, and-" At this point chunks of concrete quietly but not silently leap up from the surface of the sidewalk (behind Glam) and try to sneak up on them. "-they won't melt or accept electrons or whatever unless I let 'em. So fire away." The concrete then tries to wrap around Glam like it's a liquid, then solidify.

[mxglam]

They notice the concrete, and fly up, aiming down and shooting at the concrete with kinetically charged blasts. "Okay, firing away!"

[sturdycoldsteel]

The concrete pieces smash into smaller pieces, which get bigger again and keep flying after Glam. Mountain flies at them with her hammer...

And calls the Protectorate on her ear-comm. "Mountain engaged with Glam at-" totally a real intersection "-They outright said they were gonna steal something, tried to talk 'em out of it, they didn't listen."