[b]Anathet![/b]

[No!! No!!] Tia screams the words inside your head, frantic. There is no way for her to bar your passage physically, so she compensates by trying to boil your brain. [They will kill you!! Not allowed!! Mine!!! This is mine!!!] She spreads her arms wide, opens her mouth in a silent scream, and her hair writhes like a nest of snakes. Fear and distress blind her (is that insensitive to say?) to what she's doing to you, and vaguely you hear discomfort from below: the psychic backwash is affecting the Annunaki, too.

Take a Powerful Blow, Anathet.

***

[b]Canada![/b]

A laser bolt pings off your vambrace. Jezcha ab-Marduk knows exactly one (1) response to what's happening right now and that's to draw a sidearm and shoot at you. You bat it away reflexively, as if the laser bolt was a naughty kitten, but then the janissaries see that as their cue and turn, muskets raised, heads lowered away from your searing light, and begin to open fire, too. You are very quickly the center of a storm of lasers, about a third of which come anywhere near you. But still, it's a hell of a barrage.

Then it stops, all of a sudden.

No, it doesn't. They're still firing. But the laser bolts are failing to cross that final distance. Space yawns in a sudden vast abyss as they approach you but are unable to reach you.

[b]"DISARM."[/b]

Laser muskets clatter to the engraved platform, and even Jezcha flings her pistol, albeit in your direction. It spins uselessly in that forever approach. Shamash, Breaker of Horses, raises one gauntleted hand and snaps his fingers, and space resumes its normal dimensions all at once. Which means that all those lasers suddenly can hit their destination.

***

[b]Marianne![/b]

Canada's a big girl, she can handle some lasers and a pistol thrown at her head. No, watch this, the false god and the true. Watch as Shamash stomps forward in their ridiculous panoply, all gold and gilt. The anticipation coils around them, their own delight at seeing a worthy challenge, yes, yes! It is familiar, [i]non?[/i] What can challenge a demiurge but a god?

[b]"I was worried I would have to hunt you through the warrens,"[/b] Shamash says with their false voice. What does it sound like underneath that head they have pulled over their own? [b]"But here you are. The one from my dreams."[/b] What a fright they must have had, yes, yes! They must have summoned up all of their magi and charlatans and poets in order to interpret the dreams of that burning eye, laying bare their mouse-soul. [b]"I accept your challenge, but this is unworthy of us."[/b]

They offer their hand, heedless of the gasping from the groveling Annunaki. [b]"Come, Canada Taliv. I will drown you in wines. I will garrote you in garlands. Be my sacred offering, feasted and fattened."[/b]