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

[thinkering]

"She wanted protection from the forcible recruiter and the Protectorate provided. She's technically probationary, but I have no complaints about her performance since she signed on."

[peterxy]

"Did she say why she was with a gang before?"

[thinkering]

"You'd have to go to her for details, but apparently the gang saved her from an Empire Eighty-Eight attack once."

[peterxy]

"...we really need to find a way to deal with them."

[thinkering]

"I'm open to suggestions."

[peterxy]

"I'll tell you when I come up with any."

[thinkering]

"Yeah. There's a bunch of them and they have some pretty lethal powers and most of them are already down for the Birdcage, which makes them a little more willing to dish it out. It's a problem."

[peterxy]

"I can believe that. The Birdcage part."

[thinkering]

"Yeah, it's kind of an incentive problem."

[peterxy]

"Mmhm."

[thinkering]

Patrol patrol.

[peterxy]

Patrol.

[thinkering]

A few hours later they get back, and Lorica works on mass-producing comms, enough to get everybody at a typical Endbringer fight one of their own.

[mxglam]

Knock knock!

[thinkering]

Bots let Glam in.

[mxglam]

"Hi, love."

[thinkering]

"Hi," she says. Apparently making 500 of the same thing doesn't require full-on fugue.

[mxglam]

So it would seem!

"Comms?"

[thinkering]

"Yep. Bots are doing most of the work, I'm basically just assembling from kits and inscribing serial numbers so I can claim to be a necessary part of the process if anyone thinks I've gone too self-replicating-y."

[mxglam]

"Hmmm." Watch watch. "So no time for maybe some hypnosis power testing?"

[thinkering]

"I'm basically doing Lego for dummies, here, I can talk at the same time. Bot can put you under and I'll take over from there and put down the paint-by-numbers if it turns out to split my attention too much?"

[mrglam]

"Okay!" He lies down on the loveseat.

[thinkering]

The bot starts up the induction procedure in Lorica's voice.

[mrglam]

And he's soon under.

[thinkering]

And then Lorica, assembling comm bits without even looking, decides not to tell him he's in a forest this time. She goes over the list of power classifications in her head and starts asserting that he can produce copies with quintessential versions of each - insofar as she can test things in this workshop, anyway.

She particularly wants to know if he can do a Rewind.