[quote=@Tatterdemalion]Sara lands hard and her leg gives out under her, leaving her in an awkward half sprawl. “Run, squirt! [i]Go![/i]” She glances over at Amy and sees a moment of hesitation, and grasps at straws. “I [i]promise[/i] I’ll save the bear! Now [i]fucking scram![/i]”

There’s honest desperation in her voice as it cracks. It’s an Afraid Adult Voice, because she knows she only blew off one arm, needing to get it [i]perfect[/i] to save the kid’s life. She did [i]not[/i] eliminate the rifle.

She made her choice.

[[b]9,[/b] but because I have Influence on Amy, that’s a [b]10.[/b] Clearing Angry.][/quote]

If she'd hesitated at all, if you'd had to focus on the kid at this critical moment instead of Maria - you'd have been in trouble. But she doesn't, and you don't. You see the look in her eyes then. She trusts you. She believes in you. She sees you and her eyes are full of the glittering wonder that you're [i]meant[/i] to have when you look at [b]a superhero[/b]. And when you speak she obeys, knowing that a superhero would [i]never[/i] let anything bad happen to Admiral Bearclops.

So she's gone, giving you just enough time to hit cover before the wall behind you explodes in hexshells.

[i]"J'en ai ral le cul -"[/i] you know, people like to say 'don't hesitate' as advice for fights? They probably do that because it fucking [i]sucks[/i] to fight someone who is hesitating with a gun. Maria's not taking the bait, not coming out, not wasting bullets on suppressive fire. She's dropped into cover behind a baggage kiosk, fortified in place, waiting for you to make the first move. She's probably right to do so. This is her base. Reinforcements will be on the way. You can hear the fear in that constant flow of filthy French but it's the kind of fear that will make her impossible to approach safely.

[quote=@Phoe]All at once the sounds of battle come roaring back into her ears. Drones exploding. People screaming. Gunfire bursting over top of everything like a suffocating chorus of gunpowder and whistling bullets. Her shrunken world shatters around her as all the chaos, tension, and urgency come rushing back in to fill the void left behind by the duel. Euna wipes her face on her already very messy sleeve and drops right back into mission mode. She kicks up JuneBird's E-Mauler off the ground with absurd ease, snatches it up with one hand, and flips it around to offer it back to her oldest partner. 

"We'll do it like normal: I run cover and you take the kill shot, yeah? Come on, you and I already dropped one Turbo Knight. Let's save AEGIS from the new one."[/quote]

You move as a team, covering each other, everything exactly according to your training. And the training is still true and good even if nothing else in this world is - you know you can fight in a showy and defensive way while JuneBird sets up for takedown shots. Spaceport security has nothing on you. You go through them like an improperly stored monofilament knife through the floor.

But then as you're passing you hear a rhythmic banging from a locked door. The impacts are from above human strength and you can see the hinges of the door start to come loose. JuneBird catches your eye and moves away into a firing position, leaving you to brace yourself for the charge of whatever's inside. You ready yourself to face whatever superpowered monster BlackSun has sent for you...

And then the door falls down, revealing the Shogun - trussed top to toes, ball-gagged, on her face and FURIOUS. 

[quote=@Balmas][b]Doctor Gears![/b]An explosion rocks the building, and you can feel a whine crawling its way up your throat. That Dynamite Comics collection had taken you a whole afternoon to perfect, all undone by some madwoman with a laser cannon and [i]no respect for the classics.[/i]

Rest in peace, Stalin II.

Still, you've got a good lead on her, and two generations' worth of stored experiments to lead her through. Tell me, what lovely nastiness has the Gears Foundation got stored away to stall her?[/quote]

"Ha," said Turbo Knight 2 as her ears are blasted full of a sped-up version of an early 2000's Swedish dance song. "Hoo ha ha ha," she said as she followed mechanically along the steps of the dance as it continued to blast in her ears. "Ha ha ha ha ha -"

The Magna-Melter fired, cutting the building in half and destroying Gears Invention #7894: Power Armour Party Paralyzer - along with the remainder of the room.

Little motes of fire cling to Turbo Knight as she advances through the wreckage still vocalizing her darkly threatening chuckle like she intends to continue making that sound without a second's interruption even while disintegrating the causes of her ire. She has been soaked, bombed, hit with glue and pies and some kind of gel that made her bounce around like a balloon in a wind tunnel. 

"Ha ha ha," she said because it was v. funny. "Laughing face emoji," she said, replacing the containment cell on her Magna-Melter. "Crying laughing face emoji," she said. "Eggplant emoji. One hundred emoji. Ha ha ha ha ha. Ok-gesture-emoji. Fire emoji. Crying laughing face emoji. [i]Ha ha ha ha[/i]."

She stalks forwards, hunting for her punchline.

[quote=@eldest]The future is full of frogs. 

Giant, bioengineered frogs, and meteor attacks, and humans fighting wars and saving each other and all of the dumb, beautiful things you'd expect from a species that made college fraternities and hugs, penicillin and mustard gas. They keep rebuilding their homes in the same space and hoping for the future and being the most stubborn, hopeful type of people there are. Of course, that's if she manages to stop this satallite, and whatever it's doing, from working. Which, of course, is what she's going to do.

"You know you can't win, right?" She squares off against the lumbering, huge TAG. "I'm sure you've run this fight millions of times. It won't work. Why?"[/quote]

"I do not need to win," stated Perseus, cycling his ion blaster. "I only need to slow you down."

Every barrel on the satellite began to glow in unison. Every single doomsday device and apocalyptic engine began to charge simultaneously. The schemes of a hundred world-ending supervillains finally awoke to realizations, their mad engines at last getting their chance to crack the core, or turn everyone into kittens, or turn off gravity or whatever their dark designs were.

But they are all distractions. Perseus is only guarding one of them from you. And you know what that sleek, sharp shape means - that's an enormous Pepper Grinder, a vastly scaled up Rx harvesting laser that looks like a weaponized version of the Zulrich Particle Collider whose explosion back originally unleashed superpowers upon the world.

And a dark infinity of possibility swirls within that device. Perseus will collapse the entire planet and all its infinite possibilities and timelines into a single point, a physical resource he can hold in his hand and use to spread and conquer the whole galaxy. The Matrix had it right - the last service humanity will perform for its robotic master will be as a battery.