[quote=@Tatterdemalion]Then @SARAHPHIM, to the sound of Twitch emotes being spammed by the audience of her impromptu stream, kicks Witcherphim in the stomach like a Brazilian soccer player at the World Cup, eliciting a pained grunt and a slow curl to protect her vital organs. @SARAHPHIM summons up another sword in shimmering silver and holds it, sparking and flaring, inches from Witcherphim's neck. You have to nail the dominance display or she'll just hop back up once her mutant metabolism gives her a second wind.

"Hail to the queen, [i]bitch[/i]."

[[b]5[/b] on Take A Blow, and we'll take [b]I Don't Care What You Think![/b] for a permanent +2 on Reject Influence, thanku; that's my fifth advance, by and by.][/quote]

There's an upside to fighting yourself - you follow your own logic. There's never a moment where you need to be afraid that she's going to swing up and go for another assault, or wait until your back is turned and go you again. If you were in her position you'd realize just as instinctively that dragging this out would push things from cinematic to ugly. There's a hierarchy here, and she's found her place in it - below your boot. 

At the same time she doesn't give you the satisfaction of asking for mercy. She spits a little blood and turns her face down, hiding a snarl. But you can see the back of her neck and that's tiger for surrender. 

"I don't suppose you'd let me take her captive?" said Dominus as her crew of bio-boosted minions regroup around her. She sounds joking but there's an unmistakable supervillain edge to the question.

*

Locker: oh here we go
Bode: It makes sense that she would ask this. Dominus' biomedical science would receive an enormous boost by being able to study Witcherphim.
Locker: yeah but it means this situation is going to turn into /another/ alpha-bitch standoff
Angel-IKA: She's joking, she doesn't mean it, she wouldn't kidnap someone.
Ferraphim1tp: That sounds wistful~
Bode: And incongruous with her criminal record
Angel-IKA: I don't know what you're implying!!

[quote=@Phoe]Because it does. If Maria gets another bead on her, the next attack would come from behind. Fight Science had a lot to say about that too, but with much fewer caveats. She had to get out. She had to get out [i]now[/i]. She had to... think, damn it. Did she have any help left?

[Directly Engage: [b]9[/b]. Errant resists or avoids Maria's blows][/quote]

Up. Over. Through. There's a crash of armour from behind you but your attention is where it should be: Forward, full.

You are [i]just [/i]ahead of the response loop. You arrive in rooms right as people are pulling emergency barricades into place, skidding through waves of stun pistol fire. Doors are slamming shut seconds behind you. There aren't decisions, there are just reflexes - your own, your skillwires', your training. 

Those reflexes have sent you careening at a full sprint through a TAG maintenance hangar. If you had time to think strategically you would have avoided this area but this wasn't that kind of chase. And sure enough you see a cable surge with power and one of the Zetas detach itself from the wall, still hooked into its bay by dozens of cables. Like most TAGs it's unmaned - a remote pilot has just brought it up on their VR sync and in a matter of seconds the rest of the machines in this bay will follow suit. It lurches forwards, bringing up its secondary weapon - a heavy Riotstopper, a blast of instantly hardening and immobilizing foam. Like everything you're doing it's a reflex choice - the pilot is still disoriented from the connection and is going with an indiscriminate area weapon rather than anything more precise.

[quote=@eldest]There is a very simple reason Ferra has been out of touch. She was sitting at day four of being under siege. So was everyone else in the Gears Foundation. She'd woken up to panic as their cooperative project with Athena Macrotech on Perseus turned into a security and financial audit literally overnight. Buried in the list demanded was a full inventory of all Gears projects on and off site, down to location and security.

We shall leave it at the relationship cooled after that.

The audit team (thankfully without any Champions, who are presumably off doing something more important to the bottom line) has cordoned off the Gears Foundation building and the first arbitrators were gearing up for a breach when an intern had noticed and hit the panic button. The ensuring field going up had cut the audit team's TAG in half by fortunate placement, and the rest were stuck on the wrong side of a controlled temporal distortion. The audit team had spent most of the last day bringing up and trying a tunnel boring laser on the field, to no effect, and were leaving it on while they worked out the next step.

On the other side, in Professor Gear's office, Ferra and the Professor have a good view of the laser trained on their window, blocked by the field. And it's here that they've decided to figure out, what next?[/quote]

"You know this facility doubles as a spaceship, right?" said Professor Gears. "Or - [i]technically [/i]it doubles as a submarine, but I reckon I can get it up to spaceship functionality. They're basically the same technology. Anyway, what I'm saying is, do you want to go to space? Mars is terraformed, albeit occupied by hostile robots. I can set up a dimensional internet port. It'll be great!"

There's definitely a little waver on that final note. She's more trying to convince herself than you.