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]

To Clobber, "Call me when it's over, I can come and clean up!"

To Glam, "You want to beat me in a fight? Give me a more compelling reason to fight."

[mxglam]

"I will, thanks," Clobber says before throwing more rubble at Glam, who shoots it to pieces with a gun.

"I'll tell you when I think of one," they say.

[sturdycoldsteel]

And she goes back to unBehemothing New York.

[peterxy]

After a while, she gets a call saying that there's a certain street that could really use some fixing.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She flies over and clears the not-glass-or-wood parts of the mess up in less than ten minutes.

Actually, she can't fix those streetlights either, she doesn't know wiring. But it's better than it was before.

She'll just finish this block of Behemoth aftermath and then be done for the day. She'd rather be fresh and alert when she fixes that bridge just beyond it.

[mxglam]

When she's done for the day, there's someone lurking there, watching.

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Hello, Glam. You can talk to me, I'm not doing anything that particularly needs concentration right now."

Rubble continues to rearrange and twist around and separate into types.

[mxglam]

"Hiya. Sorry for the thing earlier. I didn't end up stealing anything."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Thank you for apologizing I suppose. Are you going to steal things and pick fights tomorrow?"

[mxglam]

"Um. Not tomorrow, no."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Hm." A grid of support pillars starts going up on an empty lot.

[mxglam]

"And for what it's worth, the next at least three or so times I do pick up a fight will probably be with gangs of villains."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Good, good. You seem like the best sort of villain. Or solidly on the better half at least. Oh, I slipped up on the 'they' for a moment in the fight, so, sorry."

[mxglam]

Pause. "It's fine. And the villain thing is totally contingent, I try to be as little villainous as I can while respecting other constraints that mooooore or less force me to be a bit villainous."

[sturdycoldsteel]

Sigh. "I know about constraints, I guess. Plenty of stuff I'd really rather be doing and simply can't. All you can do is work with it or try and find a way around it."

[mxglam]

Blink. "Yeah. Yeah that's- that's pretty much it, yes."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"I still can't just take your word about your limits. Maybe what you're doing is a reasonable response, I don't know."

[mxglam]

"I know, and I wouldn't try to convince you otherwise, because I can't tell you about them. But I do try to minimize damage and such, the only reason the street was so banged up was that I knew you'd be coming back to fix it."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"I think I have some guesses. Your things are... Fake on some level. When I tried to understand how they worked, they disappeared. Guess it doesn't matter how they work if they still work."

[mxglam]

No hesitation as they lie: "They're not fake, but my power doesn't like scrutiny. I'm the only one allowed to really pay close attention to it. Usually people have to be closer to my stuff for my power to care, though."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"I feel the fabric of the world. Especially stone and metal. Whatever nonsense you came up with that blocks that is- unpleasant, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't do that when we aren't fighting."

[mxglam]

"Sure. I don't think there's quite anyone that can do the same thing you did there so I shouldn't need it otherwise."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Very good." The top floors of that building's frame are taking shape.

Mountain doesn't quite believe they're not fake. Glam is attention-seeking, wants to beat powerful people in a fight, insistent that their stuff isn't fake. Glamours that rely on belief are a thing, in her world. A few kinds of Fair Folk can do them. She carefully doesn't believe this very hard, though. It'd be rude if she managed to make them fall out of the sky.

[mxglam]

Very rude, yeah.

"So, it's pretty cool what you're doing, here."

[sturdycoldsteel]

"Well I am getting paid. But thanks."