philadelphia, meet chevalier

[peterxy]

The next few days proceed as normal.

Until they don't: the Philadelphia and Brockton Bay teams have been talking, and they're thinking of trading Chevalier with a couple of Wards. Philadelphia has quite a selection of them, including a couple who triggered during the Behemoth attack on Pittsburgh, while Brockton Bay has the opposite problem.

The current Philadelphia Ward lineup is:

• Laser Tag, a Tinker who specializes in weapons that have cumulative effect. He has a laser gun that causes various conditions on its targets each time they're hit, usually taking them out on the third or fourth hit.
• Clasp, a Breaker-Blaster-Striker who can cause objects to be almost weightless and much more resistant to damage for as long as he's holding them. He can only do that to one object at a time, and the weightlessness of the objects he holds means he can both throw them very far or use them to hit things. He can also apply this property to his costume, rendering him much more resistant.
• Mirage, a Mover-Stranger who can toggle invisibility for a very short time when no one's looking and can teleport within her line-of-sight while in that state.
• Glimmer, a Brute-Mover who can create a forcefield around her own body that makes her glimmer and become very resistant and slippery.
• Transfer, tentatively rated as a Blaster-Striker who can draw heat from a source and then dump it somewhere else, or conversely dump extra heat somewhere that he'll later have to replenish.
• Blockage, a forcefield Tinker whose forcefields can absorb any impact but disappear upon doing so.
• Lightbulb, a flying-artillery type of Mover-Blaster that can shoot balls of kinetically charged light whose path he can influence as it flies through the air.
• Iter, a Thinker precog who can see where objects are slated to be up to ten seconds in the future, similar to the way Rewind sees the past.
• Silica, a Master who can animate statues made of sand. There's no limit to how many statues she can animate, but there is a limit to the volume of sand she can control at a given time.

Comments

[peterxy]

Rewind pouts. "No fair!"

[mxglam]

Glam floats over to her and pats her head. "Deal."

[msecho]

Echo giggles.

[peterxy]

Rewind and Silica are patrolling together. Since neither of them is much of a Mover, they're on the ground. Technically they should be surreptitious and silent to make up for the fact that they're not flying overhead, but:

"Sssooo, how's Philly?"

[alicornucopia]

"Oh, it's, I dunno, different. I think there are more history museums than here."

[peterxy]

"Yeah, prolly. Are the teams very different? I've only been a Ward a couple of months, I dunno what stuff's like in other places."

[alicornucopia]

"Lorica's kind of more standoffish than my old captain. And the tactics were all different too because different powers."

[peterxy]

"Yeah, she's her own thing," Rewind agrees. "But she's been nice to me, when we talked. And hey, did you hear she's dating Glam?" she whispers conspiratorially.

[alicornucopia]

"No, is that even allowed?"

[peterxy]

"Yeah, as long as it doesn't 'compromise their judgment on the field' or something like that." She shrugs.

[alicornucopia]

"Does it?"

[peterxy]

"I dunno? Tee bee aitch I think if it was up to Lorica we wouldn't even know, and the Teeth fight went alright too."

[alicornucopia]

"Huh. I wonder if she's friendlier with hi- them."

[peterxy]

"Him? Huh, I kinda see Glam as more girly? Not that their gender isn't what they say it is, and stuff, but, you know," she quickly amends.

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah I get it, I dunno, maybe it's 'cause - they're - dating Lorica? Why, is she gay?"

[peterxy]

"No idea, gaydar's silent on that one, but if someone told me she was actually a robot pretending to be a person inside that suit it wouldn't surprise me."

[alicornucopia]

"Ha, but then who would've built her? And doesn't she have like an uncle or something on the team?"

[peterxy]

"Transit's her dad, yeah. And maybe he built her, maybe he's a secret Tinker and the reason she has her super secret mind protection power is really that she doesn't have a human brain."

[alicornucopia]

"Wicked. It'd be weird to have a teleporter Tinker with such a weird power limit though."

[peterxy]

"Power limit?"

[alicornucopia]

"The thing where he can't control his distance? Did I remember that wrong?"

[peterxy]

"Oh right yeah that. I thought you were talking about his Tinker specialty. Yeah I dunno what the deal with his power is."

[alicornucopia]

"It'd be a stupid thing to build in is my point. If he tinkered it."

[peterxy]

"Yeah."

[alicornucopia]

"Maybe he's just pretending to be her dad so no one will suspect she's a robot that, like, Armsmaster built."