Zoey Boey

Young Justice

Vincent and Pei

---

Vincent stood alone on the training grounds, his eyes closed. His spinal implant glinted in the sunlight, his sleeveless athletic shirt tailored to allow his implant to easily connect to the port on his back. Over the years, thanks to a mentor of sorts he had when he first started fighting, he had become rather skilled in a particular form of shadow boxing. It only took one or two fights for him to get an idea of the way someone fought, right down to their form. At that moment, there was one person he wanted to fight again, more than anything. He wasn’t a man who was used to losing and if he ever got the chance, he wanted to be ready to make sure that one loss remained his only loss.

His eyes still closed, Vincent took a fighting stance as he imagined his own mentor, Nightwing, standing in front of him. Their fight, admittedly, didn’t last very long, but it was long enough for Vincent to get a good idea of how the veteran hero fought. Before, Vincent had made the first move, which he was sure was the reason he lost the fight, so he decided to let ‘Nightwing’ take the initiative. His right forearm turned jet-black as he hardened it to block a strike from one of his mentor’s Escrima sticks. Driven by the instinct that had not only made him undefeated but also kept him alive, Vincent countered with a left straight, his fist hardening at the last moment before ‘impact.’

The match continued like this for a few moments as Vincent and the mental image of his mentor attempted to counter each other. Patches of Vincent’s body hardened seemingly at random, as if he were actually defending from attacks he couldn’t block. Then, Vincent saw an opening in ‘Nightwing’s’ defense. Part of the outer shell of his implant leapt from his back and around his hand. Vincent focused on it, using his power to increase the speed and power of his punch, doing his best to capitalize on the opening…then he suddenly stopped and let out a frustrated growl.

Just like in their actual fight, Nightwing had quickly figured out that it would’ve been difficult to damage Vincent, given how quickly he could harden specific parts of his body. He had purposefully made an opening, which Vincent was eager to take advantage of. The result was Vincent’s right shoulder dislocated, soon followed by the left when he tried to attack in anger. Even though he had essentially been fighting his imagination, Vincent had caught himself about to make the same mistake.

”Shit, he’s tough even in my imagination,” Vincent muttered as he sat on the ground. ”I’ve got a long way to go before I can take on the real thing, again.”

”Times are tough in dreamland.” Pei said suddenly in the training ground. Pei was light of foot, sure, but maybe running a combat simulation in his mind had allowed her to unintentionally sneak up on him. She hadn’t said anything before because she had gotten distracted by the implant she spotted, resisting the urge to tap it with her index finger.

Vincent looked over his shoulder as Pei approached from behind. ”Yeah, I suppose you could say that,” he replied with a shrug. ”Not a big deal, though. Just means I have to work harder.” As he said this, Pei’s smile widened, endeared by the earnesty.

A moment passed as Vincent’s face took on a more thoughtful expression. ”...Pei, right? What brings you here?”

”I…” She glances around, trying to think of a reason, before settling on a version of the truth. ”...am mostly looking for someone to annoy! Mind if that’s you?” She went to plop down on the ground next to him, legs crossed.

”So, who are we fighting?” She asks, slapping her hands on her knees and leaning forward.

Vincent watched as Pei took a seat next to him without waiting for his answer. ”Nightwing,” he answered without hesitation. ”He kicked my ass before I got here. In fact, it was how I even ended up here, in the first place. It was the first time I’ve lost a fight in…well, ever. So, I’m working on getting good enough to beat him next time. But, I guess being trained by ‘the world’s greatest detective’ gave him a pretty big head start.”

He then turned to Pei and asked, ”So, why are you here? And I don’t mean here, next to me, but here...” he gestured broadly, indicating he meant Mount Justice.

”Well now I’m here to help you defeat Nightwing in imagination combat!” Pei says excitedly. ”No wonder you couldn’t beat him on your own. He’s strong, smart, funny, faster than Batman, and has unbeatable glutes.” She lists off Nightwing’s defining features. ”He’s the Boy Wonder!”

”Have you tried giving him a mirror and saying the back of his hair is messed up? That might distract him.” Pei suggests.

Vincent let out a laugh at Pei’s suggestion. ”I’ll try to remember that for next time,” he replied, still chuckling. He wiped his eyes as he calmed down and asked, ”What else can you do, besides give surprisingly sound fighting advice?”

Pei was taken aback that he enjoyed her joke so much. Had she finally found the perfect audience, she wondered? Her smile brightened. ”Oh, me?”

Out of white mist, an icicle formed in her hand. She flung it at a nearby training dummy, and the icicle shuddered before popping with an impact, spreading mist and frost. ”Aaand that’s basically it in a nutshell.” She said, scratching her pale head of hair.

Vincent let out a low whistle as he watched the misty cloud around the dummy dissipate. ”Now that’s pretty cool. Pun fully intended,” he said. ”Can you do anything with the mist, too?”

”The mist is where the ice comes from! No mist, no ice.” Pei explains. With a flick of her wrist, the mist that spread out from the exploded icicle zipped through the air, reforming into the shape of a large, intricate snowflake. She set it on her palm and blew on it, and it dissipated back into mist. ”Tra la la la la~” She whispered whimsically, wiggling her fingers.

”So, if you’re, say, trapped in the desert, you wouldn’t be able to do that?” he asked. ”Or can you make the mist wherever you are?”

”The second thing!” Pei said, demonstrating by shooting a stream of mist from her fingertips. ”It’s ‘no mist, no ice’, not ‘no ice, no mist.’” Pei clarifies a little unhelpfully.

”Oh! And this!” She flipped her legs and transitioned into a handstand. ”Eh? Eh?” She wiggled her eyebrows, sounding much more excited about this ability than the previous one.

With an arched eyebrow, Vincent watched Pei effortlessly went from sitting into a handstand. He nodded and said, ”Impressive. I’ll be sure to call you if I ever need to read something upside-down.”

He hopped to his feet and stood up, rolling his neck. ”Me, I’m not quite so acrobatic. I punch and control metal. Though, I do suppose I have one other trick.” His spinal implant clicked and whirred as it seemed to open up. Metallic panels spread out and rearranged themselves, glinting in the sunlight as they took on a familiar, yet oversized, shape. In just a couple of seconds, a pair of large, metallic wings had unfurled from Vincent’s back. ”It’s not often I get to use these things. In fact, I tend to forget about them more often than not,” he added with a chuckle.

Pei fell from her handstand, staring up and upside down at Vincent, as her mouth formed a small ‘o’.

”Wow! Metal wings!” She said. She made a ‘flapping’ sound effect and wiggled her hands around.

”Do they work? Can you fly with your metal wings?!” She asked.

Vincent couldn’t help but smirk, feeling a sense of pride well up inside of him. Rather than directly answer her question, he started to flap his wings. After a couple of flaps, he began to rise into the air, the only sound coming from his wings being that of the air moving with each flap, despite being made completely of metal. ”I’ve never really put them through their paces, so I’m not sure exactly how fast or high I can go,” he replied as he lowered himself back to the ground.

As soon as he regained his footing, a few ‘feathers’ fell from his wings. Rather than fall to the ground, however, they stopped in midair and began to float around Vincent. ”And since they’re made of steel, I can do this,” he added as the feathers arranged themselves to form a large letter ‘V’ in between himself and Pei before returning to his wings.

”That’s so sick!” Pei leapt to her feet. ”We gotta test 'em out! Wanna see how high up you could go if I blew you up?” She asked.

Vincent was about to agree, then stopped. ”Wait, what do you mean by that?” he asked, slightly confused.

”Like this! Iceburn Special Technique: Cloud Leap!” Pei stomped the ground, sending out a cloud of mist beneath her, and then she formed it into a temporary compressed ice cloud that burst upwards. She went about twenty feet in the air before landing, cushioning her fall with another burst of mist. She rolled, dispersing her momentum with a cloud-like formation in her wake.

”Now imagine if I did that for you except you had wings!” Pei said.

As he watched Pei ascend using her clouds, then return to the ground, Vincent gave a thoughtful nod. ”Alright, that’s pretty cool. Let’s give it a shot!” He unfurled his wings again, then gave it another thought. ”You sure this’ll work, though? I mean, I’ve gotta be quite a bit heavier than you are.”

Pei giggled, nudging his shoulder. ”Of course I’m not sure if this’ll work! That’s why we’re testing it!” Vincent grinned at that, seeing the sense in what Pei said.

Pei whipped her hand about and created a slow moving vortex of ice and mist that came up to about Vince’s knee. ”So you step on that, flap your wings, I’ll launch you up, and we’ll see what happens!”

Vincent nodded and raised his wings, ready to bring them back down, but paused. He turned to Pei and held out his hand. ”How about it? Wanna take a trip around the island with me?”

Pei’s bravado lost a step, and she found herself flattered. But then her grin widened, and she smacked her hand into his. ”Would I?!” Using his hand as leverage, she went to pull herself onto him in a piggyback. She used her other hand to maintain a connection to the ‘jump pad’ of ice.

”Ready when you are!” She exclaimed.

As Pei hopped onto Vincent’s back, the steel between his wings morphed and molded itself into a kind of harness. He lifted his wings again and stepped onto the mist cloud. Pei moved her hand straight up, and the mist surged upward into a windy cool shower. As he brought his wings back down, he felt the mist propel him and Pei into the air, quite a bit faster than he would have been able to on his own. Using his momentum, he flapped his wings again and again, making himself pick up speed as they ascended. Within moments, they were a couple hundred feet above the ground, his wings spread out to catch the thermal currents rising from below. ”How’s the view?” he asked Pei, raising his voice over the rushing wind.

Pei was holding on tight now, her heart gripped by exhilaration and terror. They had gone much higher than she anticipated, and though she could cushion most falls, skyscraper height was much beyond her capability of survival.

”Aaah!” She screamed into the back of his shirt. ”Aaahahah! Haha!” It morphed into a laugh as she glanced around.

”High!” She yelled.

”Higher?” Vincent called back, mishearing Pei through the rush of wind. He brought his wings down harder and climbed higher into the air. Pei realized the translation error immediately and just cackled, holding on tighter. In truth, he wasn’t exactly sure why he knew how to use his wings. Back in Bludhaven, he never had much opportunity to practice with them, yet here he was, flying as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

He evened out at about four hundred feet, less than half the height of Mount Justice. ”Still doing okay back there?” he asked Pei.

”Perfect!” She said, hanging on very, very tightly. At this point, she was just a giggling mess.

Vincent grinned, then tucked his wings in. The two of them dove toward the ground, hurtling headfirst. Vincent found the speed exhilarating: he couldn’t help but grin almost madly as he did his best not to laugh, knowing the wind would steal his breath. At the last moment, just before he and Pei reached the tops of the trees, he unfurled his wings and leveled back out, using the speed from the dive to fly even faster.

Before he knew it, the two of them were about to circle back to where they started. He started to flap his wings backwards to slow down and managed to land safely where he and Pei had been chatting not too long ago. ”Goddamn, that was great!” he exclaimed as his wings retracted back into his implant. The ‘harness’ that had wrapped around Pei let her go as he stepped away. ”I didn’t know I could go that fast!”

Pei detached from Vincent’s back and then dropped belly-down onto the ground, grabbing the dirt. ”I didn’t know you could go that fast, either.” She said, voice muffled by the dirt. She let out a few residual nervous giggles.

Vincent sat down on the ground next to Pei and leaned back on his hands. He could still feel the rush of the wind against his face, the thrill of defying gravity. ”I almost didn’t wanna come back down,” he said with a chuckle. He then turned to Pei and asked, ”You feel alright? Still got all your pieces?”

Pei gives a thumbs up from her position on the ground. ”That was…”

She cuts herself off, before looking quite seriously at Vincent. ”I can’t remember the specifics. But an oil worker, in the American Wild West, fell several storeys while working on a regular job. Right from the tippy top of the tower all the way to the ground. He survived with minor injuries because of the lucky consistency of the mud.”

Pushing herself up to her feet, she continued. ”His friends went to go help him up, but the first thing he did was climb right back up that ladder and get to work. The reason? Because he knew if he didn’t climb back up that tower at that very instant, he’d never climb it again.” She said sagely.

”Basically, Vince, what I’m saying is-” She went to jump into his back again. ”If I don’t do it again right now I don’t know if I ever will!” She cried.

”Whoa!” Vincent cried out in surprise as Pei went to climb onto his back again. He chuckled and stood up, carrying her piggy-back style as he said, ”Alright, alright, one more lap. I don’t even think I need a hand, this time, either!”

Once again, his wings spread out from between his back and Pei. He lifted his wings and brought them back down. Dust rose from the ground as he and Pei rose back into the sky, though not quite as quickly as the first time. He gave another strong flap and they once again sped off, climbing higher as Vincent continued to pick up speed.

”Eeeuuuhhh~!” Pei made an unsure noise and laughed some more. ”Don’t forget the harness!”

”Right, sorry!” he called back over the rushing wind as steel once again wrapped around Pei’s torso, securing her to his back.

“Yes, I can feel it- I can feel my security and my confidence growing with every second!” Pei said, not really sure if she was lying or not. “Just don’t do any loop-de-loops!” She cried out as they got further and further away from the training ground, their voices trailing into the open air.

World of Light

Sakura Level 9: 26/90
Karin Level 5: 3/50
Location: Suoh
Word Count: 983
Points Gained: 2
New EXP Balance--- Sakura Level 9: 28/90 (pending)
Karin Level 5: 05/40 (pending)

Karin joined Roxas in being truly surprised at what she saw. Sakura stayed on her knees, head bowed, her eyes closed. Karin crouched and waved her hand in front of Sakura’s face.

”Fascinating..! I wonder what he’s doing in there?” Karin said aloud. ”I imagine there won’t be much to look at in her brain.” She joked dryly. Truly, though, she hoped this would work. She needed a worthy rival, and seeing Sakura being held back by some unfair mental curse was starting to get under Karin’s skin. It wasn’t like Sakura to not just bounce back.

Karin sat down and meditated for a while, observing the sky, city, and people.

Raz emerged and Sakura opened her eyes, shaking herself out of her trance. He asked her how she was feeling, but she didn't quite catch the whole thing.

”I’m…I’m ready when you are, Raz-kun.” She said, holding her head.

”Sakura, it’s over. He said it went well.” Karin said flatly.

”Huh? Already?” Sakura asked, looking at Raz.

”You were asleep for ages.” Karin said.

”...Oh…I don’t…feel any different?” Sakura said. ”Raz-kun, do you think it worked worked, or..?” She asked the psychonaut. ”I guess we won’t know for sure until something traps me again.”

Regardless of the measure of Raz’s success, their conversation would have to be short. ”You can give her the details later once we’re in a base of operations. We must reconvene for dinner, and get Sakura fused. Hopefully that little stunt fight won’t blow our cover.” Karin said.

”It’ll be fine…I’ll look different! And I’ll call my Hadokens ‘Wave Motion Fist’ instead.” Sakura said.

Once they reunited with Goldlewis in the Hummer. Sakura nodded at Peach and accepted the spirit, holding it in her hands. ”Phew…okay.” She’d never get used to the weight of another person’s Spirit in her hands. Though it wasn’t nearly all that remained of another person after they were gone, it was their essential power condensed into a single object.

”I promise to do my best.” She said to the Spirit quietly. It was all she could promise to do. Hopefully, wherever this person was now, Sakura could honor their gifts and their talents by using them to do more good. The last time she had fused, she had done it in a desperate situation, which had let her get used to the concept. Now she was doing it again in a more tactical gambit. She still planned to defuse with this spirit once the work was done, just like last time with Arashio.

Karin set her hand on Sakura’s shoulder for a moment, a gesture that Sakura found very reassuring.

With a quick, resolute sigh, she put the heart into her chest.

For Sakura

New Spirit Absorbed
Yushin Clements

The host has grown two inches taller and her frame has became somewhat less hourglass like. Her hair is a darker shade of brown and has green highlights, and is now asymmetrical on the left side, shaved to show some of her left ear. Her skin is also a little more tan. Her tracksuit is now sleeveless, instead of the sleeves just being rolled up to the elbow. Instead of white and red with blue highlights, it’s now white, red, with black highlights instead, with her sneakers being black. Her bandana is still white and her gloves are still red, however. The host is now more bold and braggadocious, and overall less polite, like she was when she was younger. This Spirit confers the power Telekinesis, which lets the user move objects and herself with her mind. It confers the weakness Harsh Reality. Others can now sense her presence from a distance and will hunt her down for her brain. She can now be Brain Crushed and is susceptible to PR.

The light died down and Sakura looked down at herself and her hands, felt her hair be shorter.

”So… how do I look?” Sakura asked. Her voice sounded the same. Maybe a little deeper, but her voice tended to get pretty low when she shouted out her attack names anyway. She also sought out the nearest mirror and touched her face, feeling its slight differences. She pulled at her headband. This happened with Arashio, too. Now that she was fused, she didn’t feel uncomfortable with the thought anymore.

”You look fine to me.” Karin said. ”I could see you dressing up like this and dyeing your hair like that.”

Sakura caught the look on Roxas’ face, and smiled, reassuringly. ”It’s still us, Roxas-san.”

”This happened with me before, too. It’s much less of a change than coming back from getting your wisdom teeth removed, or getting punched really hard and forgetting where you are for a bit.” Sakura said.

Though, she was more confident. Casually, she unzipped her jacket and let it fall to either side, showing off the red crop-top underneath and her toned midriff. ”I’m actually kinda excited, now.”

”That’s good. We’ll meet this Luka Travers and see what we can do within this city.”

When she stepped out of the hummer, Sakura gasped, covering her mouth with both hands. ”Oh, my gosh..!” She said, surprised. It was like a whole different city!

”Is it that splendid?” Karin asked.

”There’s…there’s more commercials than I would have hoped for, but, yeah! It’s beautiful!” Sakura said.

Once inside the place, Karin accepted the handshake and tipped her head respectfully, while Sakura also accepted the handshake.

”This menu is familiar.” Karin said.

”I want the sushi! See if it stacks up to my moms. Probably not, but, y’know, what does?” She said. She waved her hand through the vision menu, amused and happy. Karin raised her eyebrows, equally amused, and went back to perusing her menu to pick out something delicious.

”Thank you for meeting us here. Are we here for pleasantries and small talk, or, exclusively business?” She asked, looking to set the tone right away so everyone was on the same page.

World of Light

Level 7: 29/70
Word Count: 904
Location: The Under
Points Gained: 2
NEW EXP balance--- Level 7: 31/70

---

Jesse winced as the giant leg wailed its final horrible scream. Cleaved in twain! Blood everywhere. It was dead. They had won! Jesse faked a spin with her Service Weapon, and faked holstering it too, just for good measure.

“Who the hell is Isaac, anyway?” Jesse asks the room, not really expecting an answer.

This place dropped its rewards, though Jesse wasn’t particularly interested in any of them. She certainly wasn’t going to put on those creepy high heels. As far as she was concerned, she had gotten lucky with her Sigil, and she wasn’t going to push it.

Seeing the hole to their next floor, Jesse just barely failed to suppress a childish giggle.

“Oh, gross.” Jesse said, poking it with her foot. “Listen, before anyone does anything. I am capable of healing with a striker of mine. As long as you can stand in one place for a bit, the Healing Waters at your feet will heal most wounds.”

It was Nadia who took the plunge first. Poor Nadia. Nobody asked her to do these things, but she did them anyway. “I hope you don’t start to resent us!” Jesse called down to her as Nadia descended.

When Nadia gave the all clear, Jesse went second, dropping into the hole. As soon as she saw light, she slowed her descent with a low, quiet bassy sound. They really did look like some giant stomach. Grody. There were four more items, and some of them looked fairly innocuous. Others, not so much. Either way, she had already gotten her reward and was happy to let her teammates do as they wished.

Only too late did she realize the pun of what she was looking at for the ghostly pepper. “Oh, Sectonia, I wouldn’t- Oh. Ooh. I’m sorry.” She said grimacing sympathetically.

There was a sigil, the type that Jesse recognized. “That one’s probably safe.” She said to the room. Ganondorf took it, and it made him big. That was it. Good for him! He seemed like the type of person to like being taller than most people, and now he could be taller than an even greater amount of the population. Personally, Jesse would probably bang her head on the top of many doorframes.

As soon as all four items were gathered, seven tough looking creatures ambushed them out of the blue.

This really does remind me of the Hiss. At least I have other people to take the heat off me now. The only downside, and it’s a big one, is that they die sometimes. Nonetheless, not if I can help it.

“Seven of us, seven of them. Easy money, people!” Jesse said encouragingly, drawing her Service Weapon.

Out of the fleshy ground emerged some kind of grotesque skinless muppet named Mr. Fred. It smacked into Jesse’s thigh, its contact with her poisonous. She almost lost her balance. “Ow.”

“Uh. Hey.” Jesse said as looked into its soulless, beady eyes. It responded by wrenching four attached Homunculi out of the ground, pale tumorous things about half Jesse’s height, all attached with skin cords to wherever the bottom half of Mr. Fred was. Almost immediately, her Sigil power activated, wrenching projectiles of mostly blood from the soft ground beneath her and splattering them into one of the Homonculi and Mr. Fred.

Jesse evaded backwards, avoiding a burst of blood in the meanwhile. She plugged one of the Homunculi in the face with Grip, causing it to splatter and then ash. The rest of them couldn’t reach her due to their cords, which Mr. Fred promptly severed. That ended up sending more blood Jesse’s way, and then Mr. Fred burrowed back underground. Jesse floated into the air to avoid the small reach of the creatures and the blood spray. They glanced up at her just in time to get shattered with Shatter. From their ashen corpses Health crystals spawned and zipped into Jesse’s resonance, recuperating the damage she had just taken.

Mr. Fred popped out of the ground and fired blood at her. Jesse sidestepped and returned fire, only for him to dig back under ground. This repeated once more before Jesse began charging up Pierce. When Mr. Fred emerged next, half of his face was blown off by a superheated psychic round, her gun spinning and cooling off.

When it went to burrow back underground, she used Launch to rip the surface flesh off the ground and reveal the wounded creature. With Mr. Fred on death’s door, his Resonance weakend, Jesse reached out and found his essence with Launch. “Gotcha.”

She plucked him from the earth like a wet radish. While he floundered in mid air, she clenched her fist and violently imploded him into a meatball. Dropped to the ground with a squelch, his corpse vanished into ash. Jesse regarded his loathsome spirit with a frown and nudged it away with her shoe. She couldn’t imagine herself using it as a Striker. She wanted to save room for something more useful, like Uncle Sven the Alchemist.

Omori let himself lose his cool, but Jesse guessed there was a little of that going around.

“See? Easy. If anyone’s scratched up, like I said I have Sven the alchemist as a striker for healing. At the very least, it’s refreshing.” Jesse said.

“So, how do we get outta here?” She asked, looking and walking around. “The good news is, we aren’t being actively digested.”

Young Justice

Pei and Cora

talk about nothing in particular

---

Two superheroines were being spirited away to their new life of adventure on a cutting edge Justice League jet. A sleek, modern design that was full of space on the inside and as capable as floating perfectly still in the air as it was going faster than the speed of sound. On the inside there were chairs bolted into the walls and a decent amount of free space in the middle.

On one of these sides, seatbelt unbuckled, her hands crossed behind her head as she relaxed, was Pei Huo, the light-blue skinned girl who went by Iceburn. She was in her superhero uniform, the black base and pink highlighted cropped two-piece. Combined with her white and rainbow colored hair, she was kind of hard to miss.

She cracked one eye open and looked at the other girl across the way. ”Hey. Hey! I think I’ve left you alone long enough. Cora, right?” The two had had a brief introduction at the beginning of the flight. It was supposed to be a short flight, the Jet picking them up from separate locations then taking them to a base.

Cora was staring out a window when the girl said something to her. She turned and looked at the girl who was dressed in a pretty cool costume like Cora. She had a huge two-tone wool coat on and a white helmet for hers. She was also wearing a thick pair of gloves that had pieces of metal sewn in to conduct electricity better. It was cozy. ”Yeah, that’s me. So… Justice League. Crazy, right? You get struck by lightning and next thing you know, you’re way up here.” She took her helmet off and sat it in her lap. Cora’s eyes were solid blue, and part of her face looked burnt. ”How’d you get here?”

Pei probably would have disagreed about the ‘cool costume’ thing on Cora’s part. ”Not Justice League. Young Justice.” She skipped out of her chair and strolled over to Cora, sitting down next to her. She rested her arm across the back of Cora’s seat and leaned in, not much for personal space apparently.

”I was born a freak, I didn’t need to get hit by lightning. I bet everyone wishes they could get superpowers from crazy physical trauma. Bet there’d be a lot of people with Car powers, though.” She mused.

”That is, I am assuming you got lightning powers. It’d be weird if you got, I dunno, spider powers from getting struck by lightning. What’s the word- incongruent?” She spoke with a slight Rhelasian accent, it sounded something like one of the other south east asian accents.

”Probably “weird.” But uh, yeah, I got lightning powers. It’s cool- Wanna see?” She brought both of her hands up and leaned back a bit to put some space between them, when suddenly a glowing blue spark flickered in and out between her palms. It was about as thick as a pencil, and eventually turned into a solid arc that danced like fire.

”I got struck by lightning, so naturally I get lightning powers. That’s weird but it’s not that weird.” Because being struck by lightning and getting anything totally isn’t weird.

”I’d love for you to show me more!” Pei grinned. ”Just keep in mind we are in an aircraft. If you blow a hole in the wall, I will probably die unless I grab you and use you as a cushion or something.” She said. She looked at the dancing arc between Cora’s hands.

To match, she lifted up her palm and created a floating crystal of ice that appeared with a crackle. A thick white mist drifted from her pale hand. ”I have ice powers! I didn’t get struck by ice though, like I said, I was born a freak. Although it is possible I was dropped into an ice bath as a baby or something.”

”Okay, that’s pretty co- awesome.” Cora stared at the little misty cloud curiously. ”Oh yeah, I can fly too. Well- Kinda. You know how when you run electricity through a wire, it makes a magnetic field? I can do that to myself and float off the ground like I’m a wizard or somethin’” Cora sounded southern. She was from Florida, after all. ”I’m not real good at it or anything, but I can jump over buildings with it!”

”It is cool.” Pei responded. ”A single bound, huh? How high we talking?” She flattened her hand and moved it up and down, making several notches in the air to represent height.

”Something like uhh… A hundred feet maybe? I dunno, I jumped over my house a couple times and it’s got two floors. Landed like a rock but I didn’t break anything. It’s like I just ignore a part of gravity, sort of. Problem is I can’t stay that high up. I float back down, but I don’t actually touch the floor. It’s weird.”

”So…your house is two storeys and a hundred feet tall? Or are you just guessing that’s how high you can go?” Pei asked, tilting her head to the side.

”Just guessing.” She shrugged.

”So you’ve never done it before. Well, whatever- as long as you’ve zapped bad guys before it’ll all work out.” Pei pat Cora on the shoulder with gusto.

”Welllll… Not yet.” Cora said, laughing a little. ”I only got zapped a month ago, haven’t had a chance to zap another person aside from Wonder Woman yet, and that didn’t really do anything.”

Pei looked at Cora intently. ”As long- as long! As you have done anything ever in your whole life besides getting struck by lightning, you’ll be fine.” She said, happily setting the bar as low as possible so Cora could step over it.

That prompted an outburst of laughter from Cora. Which in turn widened Pei’s smile. ”Yeah! Okay- Okayokay that works. Yeah, I’m halfway there already! I knew I could count on me!” Pei seemed pretty cool. Cora liked her already. ”What about you? Ever freeze any bad guys yet?”

”The thing about actually freezing people is that they die fucking instantly.” Pei clarified.

”But I have encased them in ice. Or stuck them onto walls. I can make my ice not that cold and put air holes in it, so I can put them in cubes like in the cartoons. See their little eyes looking around like ‘Aah oh noo I’m stuck’ it’s great.”

”That’s cool, I’d probably just electrocute them. Did you know that if you zap someone hard enough they stop breathing? There’s this muscle around your lungs that pulls in air. It spasms if it gets shocked bad enough. They might stop breathing anyway if you shock them, but that’s how tasers work!” Cora was… A bit of a nerd for stuff like that.

”Dark!” Pei said cheerfully. ”I didn’t know the specifics, but I assumed that-” She slapped her hands together violently several times. ”-If you shoved enough electricity into someone they die. Or, I guess, in your case, get superpowers! You ever worry you might give someone superpowers? Well I guess you wouldn’t know since you haven’t tried it on anyone yet. No time like the present to find out, though!” Pei said with a nod. She was still smiling in her assertively friendly way.

”I could probably just burn a hole through someone instead. A lightning strike is as hot as the surface of the sun. Hardly anyone ever gets hit by a bolt of lightning, and usually the ones who do have to learn how to walk again, or something else happens that changes their life. Normally they don’t just die, but uhhh… It’s possible. I can’t blast anyone like that but I can still probably put them out since, y’know, it’s lightning and all that.”

Pei nodded rapidly. Whenever she spoke, she typically spoke with her hands. In this case she stuck both her hands out and pinched the air, slowly pulling her arms back in over and over again, as if to demonstrate the concept of ‘restraint.’ ”Generally- geeenerally want to avoid putting holes in people. What makes us special is the power to subdue without harming. So in general tazing will be MORE than enough, right? Hey, listen, we’re both gonna be the new girls on the block.” She switched gears.

Now she set her arm across Cora’s shoulders entirely, leaning in to whisper conspiratorially. Which made Cora give her the shifty eyes for a second. ”You and me. Blood pact. We look out for each other. I can guide you and help you, being an experienced superhero myself. And you can- you can- well, I’m sure we’ll figure that out, that’s why I’m here to guide you! What do you say? Do you have a knife on you so we can cut our hands and slap ‘em together?”

”Heh. Sure. But… I ain’t got a knife. Can you make one out of ice or something? Actually that sounds painful. Uhhh… Let’s just promise to do it without blood?”

”Fine, fine, we’ll settle for second best.” Pei raised her other hand and clenched it into a fist. With the exception of her pinky, which she extended in a hook.

Cora wrapped her gloved pinky finger around Pei’s and a sacred pact was formed. ”It’s official now.”

Pei’s grin, somehow, widened even more. ”Pinky pact.” Then she sniffed. She did it a couple more times and leaned in more, like she was trying to identify the scent of Cora’s perfume or something.

Cora looked at her with a bit of confusion. ”It's static. My powers are weird.” Totally natural for a girl to smell like the screen of a tv from the 90s. Totally.

”Ssstatic?” Pei asked. Then it clicked. ”Oh, static! That’s what the TV at the orphanage smelled like!” She pulled away, laughing. ”Hey, look. When we walk into a room together, we’ll make each other look less weird by comparison. Or maybe more weird. Either way is good, right?”

”I hope so. I mean, I’m already kind of weird. Well, not that weird. I mean- I’m pretty lucky compared to other people that get zapped by lightning but I’m perfectly normal.”

”Mmm? Mmm?” She made a pair of high pitched, unsure noises. ”Mmm.” That last one was sure. ”You’re pretty weird. Glowing blue eyes, two-toned face, smell like TV static, the hair.” She gestured to each part in turn.

”The outfit. No offense.” She said, her hands up placatingly.

”I mean I haven’t even been able to make eye contact with you this whole time. I’m just guessing. Might settle just for staring here-ish.” She pointed at the space between Cora’s eyes.

Cora responded to that by looking Pei directly in the eyes. ”You can’t see it right now, but I’m making eye contact with you right now. Staaaaare.” And stare she did. ”By the way, you aren’t that weird. I mean- There’s a guy in the Justice League who’s from Mars. That’s weird.”

”That’s space racism!”

”It’s superhuman racism if we’re weird!”
”We are weird, though.”

”I don’t think you’re weird. I think you’re cool.”

”I am cool. I am the coolest.” Pei admitted. ”But nonetheless unusual.

”That’s what makes you cool! You’re literally cool too. It’s cool to have superpowers and say “FREEZE” when you freeze somebody!” She exhausted the word “cool” and then added, ”Right before I zap a motherfucker.”

”So you’re going to say freeze and then electrify them?”

”No I’d probably say something like, “You’re in for a SHOCK today!” And then zap them.”

”Because the idea of ‘freeze’ is that you give them a chance to surrender first. I can’t just use that interchangeably with a one liner.”

”You absolutely could, though. It’s your power, make as many interchangeable one liners as you want, and don’t let anybody stop you.”

She looked at Cora quizzically. ”No, I’m being serious.”

One of Cora’s oddly non-snow white eyebrows went up. ”About the surrender part? Yeah, I get that. I mean the jokes though. All the actually interesting heroes have tons of one liners. That’s why Batman sucks.”

”You’re trying too hard and your hubris is showing.” She said flatly, letting the silence afterwards hang for a moment.

”...And besides, Batman has the coolest one liner ever. He only needs one.”

”Yeah? What is it?”

”’I’m Batman.’” Pei said.

”…Know what? Point. That’s pretty good.”

”My name is already a pun, anyway. Iceburn.” She turned so Cora could see the back of her black top, the encircled symbol that looked like both ice crystals and fire.

”Oh… That looks really cool. Okay- I know I’m saying that a lot right now but really. I like that.”

”Thank you, thank you. It’s because my ice can explode if I want to. It might be a little mean but I’m happy with it. It was either that or Snowdrop! If I ever decide kicking ass isn’t for me anymore I’ll fall back on that one. What about you? Right away I look at you and think: Bright-Eyes. Or Static Shock! I think that one might be taken, though.”

”Mine is Enceladus, because when I use my powers, it’s really bright, like a flash of lightning.” She said, assuming this girl had any idea what the name even meant.

”Run that by me again?” Pei asked, turning and cupping her ear towards Cora.

”Enceladus. Like- The moon of Saturn? Brightest object in the sky that isn’t the sun?”

”...That’s kind of a deep cut to center your entire brand around. Is your target audience astronomers?”

”No, it just fits. It’s a really bright object in the sky, I can fly and I shoot bolts of lightning at people that happen to be stupid bright. Make sense?

Pei was acting like she was trying to be careful around someone who still believed in Santa Claus. ”...Do you like planets and moons and stuff?”

”Yeah, actually I do. I’m a space nerd.”

”Well, that’s all that matters.”

”Yep! So- How’d you get here? Wonder Woman heard about me and came looking for me, and that’s how I got here. Did someone catch you roughing up bad guys or something?”

That was when they got the notification- they were at the base that had the teleporter- said teleporter was to take them straight to the island that they would be spending the next stint of their careers.

”All right! From the bus, to the jet, to the teleporter. I hope they have a unicycle when we get there!” Pei said excitedly.

”Yeah! Look out world, the weirdos are comin’!”

World of Light

Level 7: 28/70
Word Count: short
Location: The Under
Points Gained: 1
NEW EXP balance--- Level 7: 29/70

---

Jesse, Nadia, and Therion all teamed up to destroy a particularly grotesque monster. Jesse would have done some cool gunplay tricks if she had the time or was any good at them. “Badass. Keep it up!”

Jesse kept firing around the place, but flinched when Ganon got stomped. “Damn!” Fortunately, he was a big guy, and seemed more pissed than hurt.

That might actually end up working out for us to be honest- oh, yep, there he goes. At that point, he transformed into a mighty beast of a warrior. Jesse was keen to stay out of his way and let him go wild on the giant leg that came down from the ceiling.

She blew away another cultists with Shatter and Evaded as Mom stomped near her, and, almost as dangerous, Ganon’s powerful onslaught trailing her wherever she went. Jesse sensed that this battle would be over soon, and she assumed that on some level Ganondorf was in control, even if he was a bit of a rage monster at the moment.

Jesse ended up on the fringes with Therion, since the rogue had gotten a little unlucky. She wasn’t directly protecting him but she was trying to create a sphere of influence where she could.

Sectonia disagreed about Jesse’s internal optimistic outlook. So that was two pissed off giants in the room, in a way.

“I think we're just about done, if the amount of leg meat on the ground is anything to go by.” Jesse said to hopefully assaude Sectonia’s frustration, unleashing a series of shots towards one of the bigger, grosser cultist monsters until it went down. She ripped a chunk of stone from the Earth and splattered another couple monsters.

World of Light

Midgar: Suoh - Anistar Gym, Part 2

Gemma @Lugubrious, Raz@Truthhurts22,
Sakura @Zoey Boey
Word Count: 6374 (+7)

Once in the middle of the gym, Sakura squeed and then covered her mouth. It was one of the coolest places she had ever seen in her entire life. She had no idea what Bede’s problem was. There was sparring going on all over between people with all sorts of amazing powers. Most of it she could make sense of, and it was all awesome. Animatronic training dummies, psychic exercise equipment, shooting galleries. The spoons, though, she lingered by and was very confused. She picked one of the larger ones up and held it, studying it for a moment, the reflection of her face distorted by the concave part of the spoon.

”...Weird!” She said. ”What the heck is this spoon for?” She wondered aloud, glancing to see what people might be doing with them.

Snatching up a dumbbell on a borderline subconscious level, she lifted it as she jogged around, craning her neck. She was thirty feet up on a climbing wall, somehow doing it while lifting, when she turned and watched an amazing 1v3 spar go down. Like a moth to a flame she dropped from the significant height and landed lightly, racking the dumbbell and sprinting over to ‘ringside.’

During one of their breaks, she let out her excitement with a loud ‘wow.’ ”You’re really strong!” Sakura said to the man fending off three attackers at once. Her fists were clenched by her chin and her eyes were practically sparkling.

The soldiers’ practice bout, already winding down after a furious but brief exchange between the gathered combatants, came to an end when Sakura approached. The tall man relaxed his stance and straightened up, a polite smile on his face despite the weariness of many years in his eyes. “Well, thanks. When my friend’s lives are on the line, I can’t afford to slack off training a single day. Still, I could be a lot better, and I don't have long to get there.” Behind him, the well-built brothers with their matching blonde poofs of hair gladly took the chance for a break, their chests heaving as they went for some water. The lady, meanwhile, looked even more worn out, and she couldn’t help but roll her eyes at Sakura’s literal wide-eyed enthusiasm as she turned away.

For a brief moment the last soldier’s gaze rested on Sakura. Then he spoke again in that same deep, measured tone. “I guess I’m what you’d call a regular here, but I don’t think I’ve seen you before. Welcome to Anistar Gym, miss.” He extended his hand to shake. “My name’s Gemma. Gemma Garrison. As you probably guessed, I’m with Psych-OSF. Vodelo Platoon.” He glanced back over his shoulders at the others. “My gym buddies here are Chris, Pat, and Anya. If I’m strong, it’s because people like them were kind enough to help me get there.”

“Especially considering I’m a sharpshooter, not a brawler,” Anya muttered. She sat down in front of a nearby fan to rest, her black hair flapping in the breeze.

Sakura went into a bow, but corrected at the last second and went for a handshake instead, her fighting gloved hand clasping with his. Grinning, she made sure to give him a nice firm handshake! For a moment she considered if this might interfere with her plan to go incognito at Psych-OSF, but, the thought passed quickly. ”Pleased to meet you, everyone! My name’s Sakura.” She bowed to everyone, quickly, like a spring. This Gemma guy spoke her language. It was only through training with others that people could get stronger! Especially rivals. (Though Sakura always enjoyed an easy win.)

”Your metal skin technique is so cool! Would you wanna fight with me?” Sakura asked earnestly. Street fighters were just that- she played it loose with the rules and Sakura’s idea of ‘sparring’ was closer to what most people think of as ‘fighting.’

Gemma put one hand on his hip, a little surprised by the out-of-the-blue offer even if his face barely changed. “Oh, you like my sclerokinesis? It’s really nothing special, but if you’re down for a friendly spar, I see no reason to refuse.” Over to the side, the twins seemed taken aback. They put their water bottles down in a hurry and headed over to spread out around an area in the corner, loosely outlining the prospective area the two fighters had to work with. Other nearby gym patrons followed suit, interested in seeing the newcomer who’d arrived and challenged Gemma Garrison right off the bat.

The man himself, however, barely noticed. If anything, he seemed a little annoyed. To him this exchange simply wasn’t a big deal. Perhaps the small crowd gathered just to see what he and Sakura could do, but if they wanted some big spectacle they’d leave disappointed. This was just your everyday sparring session. There were no stakes, and there would be neither winner nor loser; if anything, Gemma hoped that both would come away a little better for having tested their skills. Ignoring the onlookers, he took up a spot in the center of the area. Having noticed Sakura attempt a bow earlier, he extended her the same courtesy, then raised his fists. With padded training gloves on, the chances of anyone getting hurt were low. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Sakura eagerly returned the bow. ”Yeah! Let’s go!” With a snappy movement she settled into her bouncy fighting position. ”Don’t hold back!” She said. To get things started, and to tell him of her own special abilities, she gathered some ki between her hands and unleashed it towards Gemma.

”Hadoken!” If it happened to miss, it was a short range fireball, so it wouldn’t travel outside the ring, instead dissipating into a pleasantly warm flicker before disappearing completely. Sakura did it without thinking. She was used to fighting with an audience.

Her fireball was bright and flashy, but it moved in a linear fashion. Gemma sidestepped it without ceremony, his calm gaze moving subtly constantly between his opponent’s face and limbs to get build up familiarity with her patterns of motion. Rather than move toward her to attack, he held his ground.

Sakura wasn’t in a hurry yet- she was happy to control space. The threat of fireballs could make an opponent make a hasty move. This time, she aimed her fireball at the ground. ”Dodge this!” It exploded in a small area of effect, wider than a sidestep. It would collide with his knees on hit and shove him back even on block. She did this a couple more times, varying her timing, before she spent a moment to charge up a bigger fireball. Now she was gonna unleash this bad boy and follow after it to begin her offensive pressure.

Her adversary, however, had his wits about him. When he saw her aim in a way that obviously wouldn’t hit him, he predicted an explosion of some kind, and moved farther than normal to avoid the blasts. The first time he still got clipped, which for a brief moment affected his poise, but after that he moved clear each time, advancing just a little each time. Once Sakura realized this wasn’t working and changed tactics again, Gemma noticed her increased charge, then readied himself when it blazed his way.

He lunged forward, activating his Sclerokinesis. A dark, gunmetal-gray coating covered his body, its metallic sheen extending even to his head., creating a four-eyed, mask-like barrier. With complete armor he blew straight through the enhanced fireball, not even taking chip damage, to knock Sakura back with a back-turned shoulder slam, evocative of bajiquan.

Seeing her big fireball get burst aside like that made her heart skip a beat. ”Oof!” Sakura stumbled backward, squinting one eye shut. That was a familiar feeling! She let herself fall to roll to her feet.

Although his gamble had paid off, Gemma wasn’t about to let the thrill of victory overtake him. With his ability already disabled again, he returned to his defensive stance a respectful distance from Sakura to let her get up. That she hadn’t gotten the wind knocked out of her from an impact like that, even restrained to sparring levels, told him that she was no ordinary fighter.

Sakura began strafing at the same distance, watching Gemma. ”I guess you can’t do that metal thing forever, huh?” She said hopefully. Though her physical punches were typically stronger than her fireballs, she was hesitant to start punching steel attached to a strong fighter.

“Not forever,” Gemma conceded, never taking his eyes off the girl. “But I try to make the most of it.” He kept himself ready, patiently waiting for another opening.

Sakura rubbed her nose. ”Cool! I can kinda do something like that.” She said, thinking about her Focus Attack. Noting how defensive he was playing, she slapped the sides of her head. ”Okay, here I come!” She ran forward, closing the gap. She stopped dead in her tracks and shot out her leg in a light kick towards his shin. It had a deceptively far range. Then she moved in to jam her elbow into his chest, a move that really let her put the pressure on even if blocked. Gemma was roughly a foot taller than Sakura, but if she let that get in her way she’d never have gotten anywhere.

When Sakura went on the offensive, Gemma stood firm. Her kick went faster and farther than he might have expected, so rather than attempt to retreat he blocked it as best he could. His opponent followed up to lay on the pressure, but Gemma had no intention of letting her run her game plan. Sclerokinesis flared up again, and he armored through her attacks to check her with a swift blow to the solar plexus. Before dispelling his power again, he followed up with a hook to chase Sakura away.

Sakura got lower when she felt Sclerokinesis activate again, and she attempted to return fire with her own Focus Attack. The strike against her solar plexus seemed to get absorbed by the black streaks of ink that formed around her. ”Hooah!” She went upwards for a knee up into his ribs. If that didn’t work she’d be hovering in the air for a moment, slightly above Gemma’s eye level, her Focus Attack over and the ink gone.

Though his mask didn’t communicate it, Gemma found himself pretty surprised when Sakura managed to completely soak a couple strikes of her own. She then retaliated explosively wreathed in stylish furls of ink, but to her chagrin Gemma’s power nullified it all. The maneuver left her overextended, and her opponent retaliated with a simple grab to snatch her out of the air and chuck her away. ”Bwah!” He went for distance rather than impact, sending her rolling along the foam mats as far as he could within the confines of this makeshift arena. Well before she drew close to the feet of the onlookers, he’d shut off Sclerokinesis once more.

When Sakura sat up, the twin tails of her bandana fluttered annoyingly in her face before she dismissed them both with a frenzied wave. With a frustrated sigh she was up on her feet again. ”You really like that one.” Sakura said. At this point, she just wanted to get him to activate it without hitting her. She advanced again, arms up, shuffling unpredictably in and out of combat range. She began to work her way in with quick kicks and jabs. She feinted a couple of medium punches and kicks. If she could get close enough, she could try to snatch his wrist and hook her ankle behind his leg and throw him clean off his feet. That move of his didn’t seem to enhance his strength or weight.

Gemma tightened up his guard as Sakura really began to move. Had she already grasped the shortcoming of his power? Well, she’d still have to execute on it. He faced off with her barrage of speedy, noncommittal moves, using only his normal block and his range advantage to give and take a handful of insignificant blows. At last she wound up for a stronger strike, and Gemma instinctively braced for a counterattack with Sclerokinesis, but nothing came. In a flash the metallic sheen disappeared again, revealing eyes that said I know what you’re up to. He backpedaled slowly, trying to keep her at range where he had the advantage, then suddenly switched things up. If she’d already gotten used to his reactionary style, she might not expect a lunging one-two-three. Gemma made sure to commit hard on that final uppercut–then activate Sclerokinesis unprovoked to flummox this bantam’s revenge.

Sakura had him backpedaling and was looking to capitalize with an attack to his legs, but she was ready for the surge forward. His type always did that. She raised her front hand and used it to guide the three hit combo away from her even as she slid backwards, her guard sparking with blue energy. The big uppercut came in and Sakura braced against it. For a moment his uppercut hung in the air, and his metal power activated once more. Sakura didn’t bite. She was, after all, looking for the throw in the first place. ”Oops!” She grabbed his shoulder and cross him across her thigh, flipping him heels over head onto the ground.

”Phew! Gotcha that time.” Sakura said, dusting her hands. That felt good! Normally she would be all over him while he tried to get up, but it didn’t seem like he was looking for that kind of fight. So she let him get up, too. She did a quick glance around to see if any of her friends were watching the fight.

Gemma rose, dispelling Sclerokinesis as he did. While his power negated damage from the fall, the fact that he got grabbed in the first place impressed him enough. The average fighter would have either panicked or jumped at her first chance for a punish when faced with a bulwark onslaught, but Sakura did not. He clearly wasn’t the only one taking the time to think things through. Facing Sakura once more, he gave her a short but respectful nod, acknowledging that he’d gotten too frisky and she’d gotten the better of him. At the same time, he didn’t plan to let it happen again, if he could help it. Gemma raised his arms and began to advance in defensive posture, one half-step at a time. This time his hands were open.

Sakura shuffled on her sneakers, advancing forward a step before strafing back and to the side, galloping around the mat. Feeling cheeky, she ended up just striding forward and looked to throw him again, going to grab his shoulder and twist him off his feet.

Content to let her Sakura spend her energy, though he guessed she could probably go a lot harder a lot longer than this, Gemma watched and waited. After a few moments his opponent came right for him and reached out to grab his torso. Gemma reached back, trying to catch the offending forearm before it reached him in the grip of the opposite hand. Then Sclerokinesis would activate, turning his grasp into an ironclad death grip, and the soldier stepped forward–onto Sakura’s foot, to stop her from getting away, should she manage to break his grip anyway. The next moment his shoulder collided with her body, and both went to the ground. Rather than immediately let his sparring partner go after the grapple, Gemma just stayed there, pinning her down while -unbeknownst to her- the last third of his Sclerokinesis ticked away.

Sakura avoided his counter grab easily enough, but she yelped out as her foot was stepped on. ”Owie!” Then she grunted as she was tackled to the ground. It took her a moment to suck in a quick breath, and she realized he wasn’t going to let her get up this time! Even though she just let him get up!

”Okay, fine!” She said, annoyed. Wrestling wasn’t exactly her specialty, but she knew how to escape. She planted her feet on the ground and balled her fists together, sticking them against his midsection and pushing away. She pushed and quickly wiggled to get out from under him.

Gemma would have thought a pin like this would be the clincher against a markedly smaller, lighter opponent, but this girl somehow possessed enough strength that her ‘plan’ of just pushing him off might actually work. Intriguing. Without a grasp on her arm, he couldn’t go for a hold, and seeing as he didn’t actually want to pummel her while she was down or try to choke her out, Gemma changed tactics. Before Sakura could slip away he rolled off her, disengaging Sclerokinesis.

He stood to a fresh round of murmurs from the onlookers, who wondered why Gemma’s takedown had failed. Of course, they hadn’t experienced Sakura’s uncanny strength for themselves, and once up the soldier dropped his guard. “That’s probably good enough,” he announced, even though that led to some disappointment among the watchers at how inconclusive the sparring match had been. “I have to hand it to you, you’re pretty capable. I’ve definitely got what most would say is an unfair advantage, but you’re strong enough to make do. Without getting a little too serious for a friendly spar, we’re probably at a stalemate. Not much we can do.”

This is why Sakura was a Street Fighter and not a Safe Fighter. She felt annoyed and confused about the etiquette of ‘getting too serious.’ The disappointment of the crowd was ten fold in her heart. She clenched her fists and widened her stance, animated. ”Then maybe we should get serious! Come on, tap out or knock out, let’s fight for real! I’ve been holding back too, y’know!” She insisted.

Gemma ran a hand through his hair, not so sure about this. Sparring was risky business in general; the tendency for things to escalate wildly after only a blow or two was well-documented. It was why he took pains with Sclerokinesis to make sure he himself took no damage during practice fights, as well as sparring in a manner that would ensure he didn’t run out. No doubt that’s what the growing crowd, now whispering about the possibility of a real match, wanted to see. Gemma didn’t care what they thought, but he did want to give a good account of himself, and it seemed that Sakura did as well.

It was now that Raz wandered his way inside the gym, attracted to where everyone else’s attention seemed to be: a sparring match between Sakura and, it looked like, another Psych-OSF member. ”Geez, those guys are everywhere,” he muttered.

After a couple moments, Gemma cracked his neck to one side, then the other. “If that’s what you really want,” he replied. He couldn’t deny that he wanted to see more from this surprising girl as well, even if he didn’t enjoy the act of fighting. “If you’ll give me about thirty seconds to get ready, I’ll fight with you.” He removed his padded mitts, designed for the purpose of all but negating damage, and donned his battle gloves, simple as they were. “I won’t use SAS, though.”

Sakura stood up straight again, giving him his thirty seconds and setting her hands on her hips. Now the smile had returned. ”I don’t know what SAS is, but don’t hold back. I mean it.” Sakura said. ”I’m ready when you are.” She said, doing a few stretches while she waited.

Her declaration sent a fresh ripple of murmurs through the spectators, who by now had formed into a decent crowd. They took the form of a big circle giving the fighters a wide berth, trading excited -and worried- whispers.

“No way, Gemma’s actually going to fight someone?”

“You mean he’s not just sitting there and countering for a change?”

“She didn’t just say he could use SAS, did she? Ohh, boy.”

“Wait, who’s in his platoon, again?”

“Who is this girl? She’s got guts!”

“Oh man, this is going to be a slaughter.”

“Hey, someone go and get some jelly. Just…you know, in case.”

“This can’t be allowed, right?”

”Kick his butt, Sakura!”

Sakura grinned at the crowd, ready to put on a show. She waved at Raz.

Gemma ignored them. “It’s a little noisy here,” he said to Sakura, his face mildly apologetic. He then took a deep breath, in through his nose and out through his mouth. When his eyes opened, something happened, although Sakura couldn’t quite see what. Behind him, imaginary cables the width of soda cans appeared from the ether, their near ends rounded with sharp prongs on the ends. Their other ends extended out into nothing, seemingly fading out mid-air. After a brief moment they stabbed -or perhaps plugged- into Gemma’s back with enough force to jerk his torso from side to side, like he’d been shot. That motion was all non-psychics could see, however. The soldier inhaled deeply one more time just as his sclerokinesis refilled to max. “I’ll make this quick.”

The Street Fighter wasn’t intimidated. She was happy to get a sense of someone’s awesome power, even though she felt like she was missing out due to not being a psychic. Sakura bowed one more time. ”Pleased to meet you! For real, this time!”

“Ready?” the twins from earlier called in sync. “...Go!”

Gemma hardened his arm, and dropped to one knee to strike the ground beneath him. “Hrrah!” Beneath him the whole floor shook slightly, and a shockwave of force rolled out in Sakura’s direction. Gemma sprang forward from his trackstarter stance, charging toward her with massive strides.

Sakura felt the shockwave coming and met it with a fireball of her own. It exploded, clashing with the shockwave and dispersing both. Sakura dashed forward, but before she met Gemma’s charge, she ducked to the side and shot out a crouching kick towards Gemma’s calf, looking to trip him up. And of course, it would just be a solid hit to get started with.

Her leg struck true–for all the good that did, and if she followed up her low starter on instinct, that would only make things worse. Even if the man’s opening haymaker completely whiffed, Sclerokinesis absorbed what would have otherwise been a counter hit, and Gemma replied with a revolving axe kick to stomp down on Sakura overhead. With his armor in place and his only possible fear a grab, he never needed to stop attacking, so he unleashed a barrage of advancing punches and kicks. The air around him buffeted Sakura as he moved, turned even near-misses into a heart-pumping affair.

Sakura was ready, and quickly retracted her leg as fast as it went out, balancing on her other foot just long enough to step out of the way of the revolving axe kick. She raised her fists and blocked and dodged the barrage of attacks, gritting her teeth as she back pedaled. There was some gray damage building up. Making a read she channeled fluid chi through her body and activated V-Shift. On one of his mighty punches, the world seemed to slow down and darken as her body glowed and left a vivid trail of sparkling blue energy in its wake. She stepped back cleanly. ”Saw it!”

With him advancing, she didn’t need to worry about closing the gap. She snatched his wrist and shoulder with both hands and turned into him. Though she could do it even if he was pulling away, his momentum would allow her to easily carry him over her shoulder and fling him down hard into the ground. The impact would require bystanders to have to regain their footing.

“Need a hand, Gisu.”

”Easy!” She rolled her shoulders and advanced on him, looking to harass him with kicks and jabs.

Gemma stopped before he hit the ground, levitating in the air in a somersault-like spin. After half a rotation he extended an upside-down kick trade with Sakura’s opening attack, and with Sclerokinesis still active his head took no damage, while hers got a solid boot. “Borrowing this,” he muttered. Beneath him a trampoline manifested from psychic energy. He fell into it, bounced up, and came down with a back-facing heel drop into a shoulder slam combo. Before Sclerokinesis could run out he switched it off manually, but his two other borrowed abilities remained active. He backed into a trampoline summoned vertically behind him and used it like the ropes of a wrestling ring to cannon himself after Sakura again. A mighty dropkick flew the girl’s way, made safer -and far longer-ranged- by the power of Levitation.

”Guh!” As she punched downwards, she thought it would be safe. But her face was smooshed to the side as the big boot collided. Reeling, she pinwheeled her arms as she backstepped, only to get hit twice by the heel drop into shoulder slam. Sakura fell backwards and hit the ground, transitioning into a back roll just in time to see the drop kick coming. She jumped up into the air, trying to go straight over it, her arms out to the side as she pulled her legs in.

Sakura managed to avoid the dropkick, not that surprising. After twisting enough to make sure he’d land on his feet, Gemma allowed himself to fall, right onto a diagonally-angled trampoline. He bounced after his opponent, albeit at a lower angle. How high he actually bounced didn’t matter if he could just lock in his desired height with Levitation again, after all. Barely a moment after she landed, he’d be on her again. This time he unleashed movie-style bicycle kicks, striking again and again in rapid succession while sliding through the air.

Intuitively, Sakura understood the power of the bounce, and knew that with this new aggressive fight style Gemma would be coming in for another attack. As he came in for his bicycle kick, she didn’t flinch and cover her head, or leap out of the way. In a move she thought was rather bold, she converted the bending knees of her falling from her jump into a roll, forward, into Gemma. Curling into a ball she aimed to slip underneath the kick and avoid the assault. When she rose, she fired off a fast moving fireball at his back. ”Hadoken!”

Rather than face the windmill of kicks, Gemma’s opponent swerved beneath it, moving right into his blind spot. He grunted, figuring he’d gotten too fancy. While he didn’t fancy a free hit to his back, he couldn’t use Sclerokinesis again just yet without bottoming out, so as he cut off Levitation to skid to a stop he took the fireball. It did damage, but only a little; in truth he barely felt it, thanks in part to his military-grade body armor. He pivoted around into a side-facing stance to get a bead on Sakura, but rather than let her gain momentum Gemma readied himself for a lunging body blow.

Sakura felt it coming- he did this kind of thing before. As she advanced after hitting him with the fireball, she was ready with a strong, long ranged kick. Not a roundhouse, but something to deter sudden advances. It was aimed for his face and she leaned back, sticking her foot out as far as possible to prevent his body blow from connecting. It would stop him dead in his tracks, unless he armored through.

Gemma still couldn’t, not yet at least, but that wasn’t his only option. Since Sakura had the drop on him, even if just for a split second, he hadn’t blindly committed, and instead folded his front arm in front of his head to block normally. As he weathered the blow, noting the power behind it, a trampoline appeared behind Sakura just before he switched that power off, as well. He launched a side kick of his own, his legs long enough to challenge and overcome Sakura’s range.

Sakura had pushed him away with that kick, and accounting for his longer range, shimmied backwards to go for a whiff punish. She didn’t anticipate the trampoline being there. With a small gasp she briefly lost her footing and stumbled forward after Gemma missed his kick. She tried to cross her arms in front of her head to block as she attempted to regain her footing.

Perfect. Gemma planted his foot and struck. He went for an elbow thrust to the gut, sliding beneath his opponent’s block, then followed up with a straight punch right to her defense. Sakura was bent around the elbow, her cheeks puffing outwards. The follow-up dealt negligible damage, but it did push her back into the trampoline one more time, breaking it as she bounced back. Gemma wound up for a door-buster kick for the ender, re-engaging Sclerokinesis at last just to make sure that no funny business happened if he could help it. None came, and she was sent stumbling back, still reeling. As Sakura got knocked away, he felt a familiar tug through the SAS: a chance for a Combo Vision. He seized it, and in the eyes of the psychic onlookers he disappeared, replaced by a teenage girl with red hair, techwear, and some bandages on her arms. With a snap of her fingers -or Gemma’s in Sakura’s eyes- she sent a spark flying forward– and after a full second’s delay, a massive fiery explosion erupted at its location. Then the Combo Vision blipped away again.

When the smoke and flames cleared, Sakura was on her back, her legs up and her arms crossed in an x in front of her. She had blocked the explosion, though it floored her. Her body hurt on the inside. But she could still fight. She kicked her legs out and landed on her feet, snapping back into a fighting position, taking a moment to wipe her lips.

”You’re gonna get it now.” She warned, excited. She swished her arms to her sides and they ignited with blue flame that traveled down her legs and settled on her sneakers. A flurry of cherry blossoms circled around her and fluttered into nothingness. Her V-Trigger, Sakura Senpu, had been activated. Her physical strikes were empowered with an overflow of ki energy, and she could perform more powerful techniques. She meant to activate this during the whiff punish, but this was the best she was going to get at this point. If she waited any longer she might not get a chance. All she saw was the potential for a comeback!

Gemma cracked a small smile. “Let’s do this, Hanabi.” In response his arms burst into flame, empowered by his squadmate’s Pyrokinesis.

Undeterred, Sakura ran forward. She started with a straight punch to the chest and advanced into an elbow to push him back. Then she jumped right in his face to check his chin with a knee. As she fell behind him she halted all of her momentum mid air and spun like a buzzsaw at head level, her leg extended outward. ”Shunpukyaku!”

Her target managed to block the first two strikes without activating his Sclerokinesis again, too depleted to be used for anything but an emergency, and his flames did not hurt in retaliation. Gemma turned with the second blow to issue a spinning backhand, not imagining that Sakura would recklessly throw herself toward him with a knee. It struck him in the ear, ringing his head, and the girl’s follow-up was immediate. Despite his first instinct to deploy his power again, gritted his teeth and bided his time, even as he reeled from the brief but furious onslaught. To his credit he threw out a formidable uppercut, but if she managed to avoid that she’d get her combo at last.

”Fly away!” Sakura shouted, blowing through his uppercut with a follow up straight kick upwards. There was a surge of blue energy and wind. Sakura leapt up to her opponent mid air. ”One, two..!” She brought down both of her fists twice, her and her opponent bouncing higher into the air. Instead of following up with a third, she dropped quickly to the ground before he could land, and met his falling form with quick uppercut.

”Midare Zakura!” After landing the first uppercut, she zipped back onto the ground and surged upward again, doing a longer, bigger, spinning uppercut that exploded at the apex. If all that hit, Gemma would fly straight up into the air. Sakura landed with a wobble, giggling breathlessly. ”Come on!”

Gemma came down a split second later, although he didn’t exactly land. Levitation brought him safely back down to the ground, at which point he wiped a smear of blood from his lip with the back of his hand. He’d deactivated Pyrokinesis when he started getting hit, but it flared back up now as he put up his hands like a boxer and began to move forward.

On the way over he deployed two Assault Visions in close succession. A psychic facsimile of Gisu Neruman sped forward first, floating atop her hoverboard and invisible to Sakura. She charged in and pulled off a sick kickflip, rotating the board like a saw for a flurry of unexpected hits. A moment later the Assault Vision of Morris Martinez descended, bouncing on his target three times with his blue levitation orb. By that time Gemma closed the distance, and he added a flurry of fiery punches to the mix.

The sick kickflip, though Sakura certainly wished she could see it for more than one reason, struck her head. ”Bwah! What the-?” She said, her head jerking to the side as she was hit from nowhere. Uncertain, she dropped low into a block as three more invisible impacts connected. Gemma began punching and Sakura skid backwards, shielding herself with her forearm. While V-Trigger empowered her abilities, it also removed the ability for V-Reversal or V-Shift, making her weaker defensively.

Gemma’s opponent was on the ropes, and it was time to make good on his stated intentions. He wiped out the remaining fifty percent of his Pyrokinesis to call upon an Assault Vision of Hanabi herself. Bo staff in hand, she twirled in front of him, releasing an arc of flame. At the same time, he activated Sclerokinesis once more, and punched the ground once more to deal the finishing blow to Sakura’s poise–and her Crush.

At that point he knew he could probably get off a Brain Crush of his own, but such a thing was completely unnecessary. He simply moved in with one forearm extended to get beneath whichever arm he could, then snake around it with an armored grab, a form of nonsense Sakura had been fortunate enough to encounter but rarely. Gemma jabbed his fist into his opponent’s stomach and made an uppercut motion to lift her up, over, and down on his opposite side, facing away from him. From there, he needed only to kneel and ensnare her neck from behind with his indomitable arm: a rear naked choke, all the tighter thanks to his usage of his other arm on the other side of her head. “Concede,” he said simply, and he began to squeeze.

”Ggk-” Sakura made an involuntary choking noise as she grabbed his arm to try and give herself some breathing space. She began to formulate a plan- she hadn’t done any EX moves yet and had a large reservoir of explosive power at her disposal. If she could just-

It was like someone flipped a switch in her brain. If someone was looking at her face they could see her go from composed to sheer panic in a moment, the light leaving her eyes. For some reason she fired a huge, misshapen blast of ki straight up into the air, to no effect. Her body flashed with an uneven orange energy, a pale imitation of her previous EX moves. That poor excuse for a reversal just used up all of her EX-meter!

Inside her mind someone had pulled the wool over her eyes. Something was coming! She can’t be here! This is terrible! I don’t wanna get turned into soup! Somebody HELP ME! The fact that they were in a spar was forgotten, she hadn’t the wherewithal to concede.

”Hhgk- guh…” So a few moments of flailing later her eyes rolled up under half-closed lids, and she was placed onto the mat. A moment passed and she startled awake, dizzy.

”Wh-wha-? What was…” She felt herself go red in the face. Embarrassed, no, humiliated, she recalled her total loss of composure. That had…literally never happened to her before in her entire life. She felt like she was going to cry!

Gemma blinked, startled. With all his powers and SAS disabled, he looked normal once more, which meant his concern was writ large on his face. This was a shocking change from the girl he’d seen moments before, inexplicable even by a sound defeat. “H-huh? Are you-”

”I- I’m sorry- I just- I’m sorry! G-g-good fight!” Hiding her face, she got up and ran away. Because she was wrong- that had happened before. Twice. Once on the Maw, and once when she was reminded of the Maw. And now it had happened again! Was she cursed forever?!

The spectators’ hype practically evaporated. One of them, a teenage girl with a ruby-red ponytail, gave her squadmate an accusatory look. “Nice, Gemma.”

“W-what?” The sounds of their exchange faded into the background as Sakura beat a hasty retreat.

World of Light

Level 7: 27/70
Word Count: short
Location: The Under
Points Gained: 1
NEW EXP balance--- Level 7: 28/70

---

“Alright.” Jesse said as everyone gathered up. “I’ll wait out here. Once a bunch of us squeeze in, I can turn No-Collide the door.” The Director explained. “That’ll let the rest of us walk right on through like it wasn’t even there.”

“Before you ask why I didn’t do this before, it was because some unique flavor of random bullshit might occur. But now that we’ve all gotten a feel for this place, I think it’s a pretty good bet that nothing crazy will happen if we cheat a little bit. The place is happy to drop fuckin’ bombs outta midair anyway as a reward.” Jesse said.

Once the first wave went in and the doors slammed shut, Jesse pinged the door with No-Collide and dashed in, having heard the angry roar of an abusive mother. “That doesn’t sound good.”

Once they were inside, they encountered the many monsters within, including a giant leg from the ceiling. The Seekers engaged with the monsters. Jesse watched as the giant leg came down, part of a dress and all, and blinked. “Huh.” Still, she couldn’t help but be appreciative of her new mundanely bizarre reality. This was her life’s work!

The next time leg prepared to came down, Jesse Evaded, but she realized she had enough time to just run out of the way as long as nothing interrupted her, so Evading in the future wouldn’t be necessary. Her new sigil splattered a cultist coming her way without Jesse having to lift a finger.

For a few moments, Jesse left the vital work of dispatching the cultists to her allies and began charging up a powerful Pierce shot. It was her best chance of dealing the greatest amount of damage no matter where the leg appeared next.

When the leg went to stomp on her dodging allies, Jesse lined up a shot and aimed to fire a superheated hole through the giant leg’s calf. If it came her way, Jesse wouldn’t waste time sprinting out of the way and would instead instantly Evade to the side, before turning and firing. The Seekers had no formation or cohesion, but hopefully that wouldn’t be a problem. Spreading out the attention of all the enemies evenly across the room might just be the best strategy, and it’s not like grouping up would be feasible in such a scenario. Still, it made her miss her Rangers, even if just a little.

“How we doing, everyone?” Jesse asked, loudly above the din of battle. Sectonia was on support and casting her magic. Therion was doing hit and run, and Jesse found it difficult to gauge how grievous Nadia’s injuries actually were. At this point, she’d be most concerned if Nadia stopped bleeding everywhere. Ideally if anyone needed help they’d call out to her. Jesse would do the same if too many cultists tried to interfere with her sniping.

World of Light

wordcount: 2,543
Midna: level 9 EXP: ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////(72/90)
Location: Suoh
Warp Charges: 1 (+1 from fight reward)

warp locations

Virgin Victory teleport room
Top of the Split mountain
Outside the Convent of Our Lady of the Charred Visage
Tostarena Town

Sakura Level 9: 22/90
Karin Level 5: 06/50
Location: Suoh
Word Count: 5,617
Points Gained: 6
New EXP Balance--- Sakura Level 9: 28/90

Karin Level 5: 12/40

(pending)

Midna level up

Twilight Volleybomb: Midna can charge up large translucent-green spheres of energy from her shadow hand, the maximum size which can be quite astounding which she can then ‘serve’ and then ‘spike’ at her foes. Most of the sphere can phase harmlessly through solid matter except a solid core. When that core impacts with something, it creates an explosion the same size as the sphere, which can, again, be very large.

Midna and her Vibrava scouted the streets, buzzing wings and shadow sneaks letting them patrol around the small pack of survivors that was being guarded by the reassuring presence of the two streetfighters. The two flittered in and out of their scouting, guiding the group away from any packs of others and towards the bunker their charges had pointed out.

Thanks to this, a bit of luck, and an odd tendency to drift in a certain direction that Midna noticed, they made it. Not without incident, mind, as there was a close call or two, and they managed to pick up a few hiding stragglers too.

All of these folks rushed forwards once the bunker was insight, flooding the narrow corridor leading to the entrance, and breaking the self imposed silence to call out to the guards to “Open up!” “Let us in”

The response was a number of hatches popping open on the bunker, and numerous guns being pointed out form murderholes, followed by red helmeted guard captain peeking out of another right by the entrance and demanding to know “where you followed? How close are the Others”

“No Others, we snuck by them, now let us in before any come this way” one of the survivors replied urgently after she got over the initial shock of the weapons being pointed at, or rather past, them.

”And if any come we’ll handle them” Midna called over their heads from where she and the other two ladies were covering the entrance from the back of the pack.

The captain made a sound that made it clear he was unconvinced of this claim, before glancing at a subordinate who reported “sensors aren't picking up anything sir!” before cautiously adding”We should be safe to let them in?”

The captain looked visibly relieved at not having to make a hard choice today, before he recovered his professional appearance and commanded “then open it on the double, and let’s get these people inside!”

Locks were swiftly unlatched, and the entrance unsealed, revealing the captain in full as they urged “quickly but calmly please, don’t push or shove”, stepping right back into the role of crowd management, which made the operation of getting everyone inside smooth, right up until it was only the 3 seekers left outside.

“You three, I don’t care if you think you can fight Others, leave it to the professionals and get in here!” he commanded, jerking a thumb behind him to the tunnel going down that the civilians were currently moving down at a far more relaxed pace.

Karin stepped forward, her boot clicking on the pavement as if it were a heel. ”Good sir, Princess Midna speaks the truth. We, The Seekers of Light, are a travelling group of freelance warfighters with a vested interest in the public good. I can assure you we can handle ourselves and will seek out the Others and destroy them for you, free of charge.” She declared. Once again looking to improve their reputation.

”That’s right!” Sakura said with a pumping of her fists. ”Thank you, but you don’t gotta worry about us! We’re pretty tough.” Sakura crossed her arms and smiled confidently.

”And I have some proof right here:” Midna added as a last, unfurling a shadow hand to reveal the small pile of Other spirits she had nabbed.

It was hard to read the captain’s expression due to their helmet covering their eyes, but they certainly didn’t sound impressed as he began to say “I assure you, there are far more dangerous things than Buddy Rummies out…” before a crackle came from inside the room, followed by the the sound of someone calling out “This is the south gate, requesting backup now damn it now!”

The captain turned his focus immediately from the three of them to the intercom, striding just to the side of the door and taking a receiver before barking into it “Stay calm and report… and where is your commanding officer?”

“Jenkins is down sir! Hericks too, and Mary and Rob are hurt!” The man on the other side ran on in a half controlled panic, as in the background there came a loud rhythmic banging sound “They're at the doors, and we can’t open the firing ports without a Brawn Yawn getting in!”

“.... Understood. Remain calm and pull back to the second line of defense and await instructions from the bunker commander” the captain told the soldier on the other end who had signaled to them instead of that commander in his panic, before nodding to a subordinate who started relaying this to their local leader right away.

As Midna peaked inside to understand what was going on, she saw two things: one was a screen showing the panicked caller, as well as at least one of his injured comrades slumped down behind him, soaked in water and convulsing on the floor. The other thing she saw was a map, one detailing information about the shelter and, due to a certain amount of standardization, it was actually visible to normal people like them.

It gave a brief outline of the bunker, such as its main lounge and where the toilets were. It also showed where the other bunker entrance popped out on the city streets. Smart, Midna thought, to have two ways in and out so that, if the defenses broke, the people inside weren't trapped like rats in a pit.

Karin narrowed her eyes and Sakura gasped. Karin used the outline of the bunker to get a vague idea of where they needed to go. After that all they needed to do was follow the sounds of chaos. ”We gotta get over there!” Sakura said, beginning to run into the bunker. Karin caught her by the shoulder.

”That’ll take too long and they cannot open the doors. We shall find an alternative path and flank the creatures from behind. Follow me. Midna-san, use your summons to help guide us.” Karin said. Sakura nodded and followed as the street fighters sprinted away.

”On it … i think I know which way it was already” Midna said. She had, after all, seen some the Others were heading in a specific direction. Sure enough, with that combined with the map on the wall, they found their way through the streets and , once they picked up the sound of something slamming against metal, their destination was more than clear.



Soon they were upon the battlefield: a narrow alleyway leading between the two story buildings of a row of shops which terminated in the bunker entrance. The Others were crowded around said alley way, practically jostling for position to be the ones who would be first inside once the door was beaten down.

Sakura and Karin both recognized the truest threat right away. An amalgamate of a crocodile and a pile of junk, melted halfway into the ground like it was made of water. A disturbing amount of human wooden legs kicked the air where it’s tail should have been. This must be the Brawn Yawn. It slammed against the bunker doors, well past the remains of the fortifications the guards had set up.

There were also sludgy Bile Pools and creaking, flapping Plateau Pendu’s, arms dangling upside down.

”Hey!” Sakura shouted, charging a fireball. She launched it up towards a Pendu. The charged fireball exploded vibrantly and knocked the Pendu up and out of the sky. It landed awkwardly in a heap and began to reorient itself.

”Over here!” She taunted, her heart racing.

Karin strode forth. The Bile Pools were expecting to deal with threats from the inside of the bunker, so the normally ranged enemies were caught by surprise. As the nearest one went to slither away Karin dashed forward and thrust her palm into its center. It was launched, and as it came down she slammed her palm into it, breaking the Bile Pool in twain. Folded over itself, it lay paralyzed, and a bulb-like protrusion made itself known.

”Oh! Light bulb brain head.” Karin said, recognizing it. Acidic water was sprayed at high speed from the other Bile Pools. Karin dashed and jumped to the side, evading it quickly. The other Pengu’s began to gather electricity between their hands. Sakura recognized a ranged attack like that when she saw them. As one lobbed a charge towards Karin, Sakura intercepted it with a fireball of her own. They clashed, and her fireball disintegrated the charge and flew a good fifty feet into the air before dissipating.

Midna, meanwhile, had faltered when the others had charged in because, despite being forewarned about it, the sight of electrical attacks still zapped her flight reflex for a reason she did not understand. She lost her chance to get in a first ambush strike, as the Other were quickly rallying and turning to meet the threats coming from behind.

Flying Pendu quickly climbed higher up into the air, and aimed too sweep over the street fighters in-order to reach the, well, street rather than being stuck in the alleyway. Some of the slug-like bilepools had the same sort of idea, using their slimy feet to climb up the walls of the alleyway to reach sniper spots or the roof.

Oh, and one other foe made a move to reposition, one that was easy to miss: The door banging stopped and the Brawn Yawn … simply disappeared. Karin’s keen golden eyes spotted it, her eyes widening. ”The beast can vanish!” She called out to Sakura, though the brunette didn’t quite understand in the half-moment she had to process the information.

Minda was certainly too busy mentaly freaking out about the electric launching fliers to see that, as she backed up and pulled out both a pistol, which she ineffectually pinged away at them with while drawing out her shadow hand. This she used to form a translucent green orb ringed with bands of runes that swiftly grew to the size of a small car and, which she then batted towards the flying foes as they attempted to exit the alleyway while shouting ”Don’t come this way!” at them.

The shot went straight through her foes, a quirk she had forgotten about that spell due to the stress and the amount of time it had been since she had used it, and so it instead slammed into the wall of one of the buildings. The resulting blast a dust cloud of vaporized masonry down onto the fighters in the alleyway. Dust, and a pair of Pendu who had been clipped by the blast. Sakura and Karin shielded their eyes from the dust. ”Midna-san!” She called out, looking at the clambering Pengu’s and trying to prioritize her targets. Things were hectic, things were hard to parse.

As the cloud descended, those Others who were too close to the streetfighters to tactically retreat instead struck at the pair of ladies: bile pools unleashing conal sprays of water that were hard to avoid in the narrow alleyway and which had considerable knockback, while the Pendu tried to capitalize on the splash attacks to turn wet floor into shocking floor, if they couldn’t hit the woman themselves.

Karin raised her palms and put effort into defending herself. The water splashed against her defensive blue sparks of ki. Sakura kicked one of the fallen Pengu’s, batting it away before being forced to block as well. An electric bolt charge struck the wet ground behind Karin, and the blonde tensed up, teeth gritting as lightning shocked her body. ”Ggh!”

Thus, the spray tagged her, knocking her onto her back and into the electricity. ”Aagh!” Her back arched.

One of the Pengu’s tried a similar trick on Sakura, but the versatile fighter was quick to act to save her friend. Her body flashed orange and an black ink absorbed the electricity as it struck the ground she was standing on. In an instant she was up in the air, grabbing onto the flying Pendulum. She planted her feet on it and kicked it into the earth where it cracked harshly into a coma. Sakura flew towards one of the wall climbing Bile Pool and hammer fisted it once, twice, thrice, plucking it from the wall and bouncing it mid-air. On the third hit it crashed into its fellows.

Karin angrily pulled free from the remnants of the electricity, clambering to her feet and leaning on the wall and holding her head. ”Wretched little..!

Sakura rolled to a stop and charged up an EX Hadoken. While the Bile Pools rose in their pile, she unleashed the fireball with a yell, and when the blue fire cleared they were but ash. There were still a few more Bile Pools and Pengu’s in the alley, but a much more manageable amount. Midna still had her own to deal with though, and some of the Bile Pools were nearly on the roof.

Another electric charge came Karin’s way, but she was ready for it, dropping into a crouch. Even if the electricity reached her knees as long as she faced the damage she could deflect it away from herself.

Midna meanwhile was out of the alley and in the street, and faced with the foes that had escaped it. Some took potshots down into that melee, but most instead of worrying about hitting their own aimed for the out in the open princess.

”Oh goddesses,” she cursed as she dropped her so far worthless pistol and lept to the side to avoid the first shot. Or tried to anyway, but under the pressure of another’s fated end she forgot to use dragon claw to counteract her maglev mod’s sloppiness, and so she did not leap nearly as far as she had intended.

Sparks grazed her calf and caused her to jerk in pain and stumble her next step. That was enough for one of the Bile pools to get a beed on her from the rooftop, and the water blast it shot off hammered into the princess, knocking her back and into the bonnet of an abandoned car.

”Gah…” the princess hissed in pain, but had enough adrenaline running through her veins that she could scrabble up the vehicle, now remembered dragon claws puncturing holes in the metal and glass till she dropped herself behind the vehicle .. which was promptly further ruined by a hail of thunder and water.

The panting pindown princess might have been able to sit tight and await aid from her friends who were making skillful work of their own foes … had something not put itself between them.

With a splash, some of the water left from the Bile Pool’s attacks suddenly surged forward behind Sakura from the entrance of the alleyway as the Brawn Yawn lunged out of that thin film of water like a massive crocodile lunging out of a river at a soon to be death rolled Zebra.

Sakura turned too late, the creature clamping its metal jaws from her thigh to her midsection. ”BWAH!” She made an alarmed, borderline comedic sound as her world turned topsy turvy. as she was thrashed around, her upper body slammed into the wall, cracking it. Managing to prevent her arms from flailing wildly after a moment, she stuck them into the jaw to try and pry it loose, twisting her body to get free. It wasted no time in tossing her bodily, hard, into the wall. The stonework cracked even further. She was stuck in a Sakura-shaped indent in the wall before, with a deflating grunt, she fell face first onto the ground. She got to her elbows and knees, looking up with a grimace at the encroaching beast. Karin pinwheeled across the battlefield and slammed the beast's mouth shut with a downward palm of her hand. Then she slid into it, knocking it backwards and getting on her feet. They faced off as Sakura pushed herself back onto her feet. ”Oof…ouch.”

She recovered just in time to push through an electric charge aimed at the pair. The Brawn Yawn underestimated Karin’s strength and attempted to bull rush her out right, only to get cracked across the face with a resounding metal crunch, tricking it’s neck to the side. Sakura fired fireballs upwards, her firepower surpassing that of her ranged enemies easily enough to keep them at bay, or even turn the tables, as long as she could focus on them exclusively. Neither of them had a moment of focus to spare on Midna’s predicament unless she said something.

A combination of stubbornness and not thinking entirely straight had prevented her from yelling for help. Instead, she had taken a moment behind the car to catch her breath and focus instead on how to get through this on her own.

Step one was to rearm. Step two was to simply leave her cover in a way her foes did not expect.

She slipped into its shadow, and then a moment or so later appeared from behind a cooling unit atop the roof of one of the buildings making up the alleyway where the street fighters were battling. A roof which currently held several Bile Pools perched on the edges of it and, pointedly, no electrical Plateau Pendu.

Which meant the only one with lightning here was her.

With a demon blood stained ax in hand the princess rushed forwards, head clearer and purple glowing claws stabbing cement as she got off the surprise flanking attack she had squandered before. As the Other turned towards the sound or her approaching feet she dropped and slipped, intentionally this time, back knee on the ground while the foot was thrust forwards, sliding under the one shot they got in.

She slashed horizontally with the blade, striking air with it and then a trio of Other with a trio of thunderbolts. The wet monsters were hurled into the air and off the roof, only to be caught as the princess caught herself before that same edge and thrust out a beam of continuous lighting that juggled them in the air.

As they convulsed, she caught a water blast with her shield, sending a shower of thorns back in retaliation, before sending an enlarged and portaled in bear and wolf thundering across the roof in each direction to trample the other roof Other.

With them suitably distracted, she focused on those she was juggling in the air with lighting, waiting for just the last moment of her remaining juice before slapping her shadow hand down ontop of them and sending them slamming down into the ground two stories below.

She pulled the ax back to her chest, put a quick charge in it in the motion and then opened another portal, sending her Vibrava to the left while she rushed to the right to strike the Remaining Bilepools before they could recover from being stepped on by large mammals.

Or that was the plan anyway, only there was an explosion as the car she had been using for cover gave up the ghost. Then a second later a Plateau Pendu rose up to the rooftop and found the prey it had thought was going up in smoke alive and in one piece.

The Pendu in the skies, no longer distracted, turned towards the street fighters, while Pools on the wall above and close to the bunker's door remained, and those below had little time to handle the surround the Other had on them thanks to the Brawn Yawn’s taunting threat.

Karin kicked and sliced at the Brawn Yawn with her leg, dodging its bites. Sakura kept the Bile Pools and Pendu’s occupied with fireballs. It was slow, treacherous going. The Brawn Yawn backed up and fired high velocity spit at Karin, who reluctantly blocked it. It used the opportunity to submerge and erupt, coming at Karin from an unexpected angle. She was forced to leap over it. A distracted Sakura moved out of the way but it clipped her shoulder, knocking her to the ground. She felt water splash against her back. As she scrambled to her feet, the killboxes of the bunker opened wide. With the Brawn Yawn occupied, they opened fire. Bile Pools and Pendu’s were ripped from the air by voluminous machine gun fire. Karin and Sakura stayed low. Karin was confident that they could have won the bout without aid, but not perhaps without an injury.

The Brawn Yawn submerged once more. Without eyes on it, the people in the bunker were forced to close the windows to prevent its entry. But now Sakura and Karin were free to focus on the Brawn Yawn. They stood back to back in the center of the alley.

A tense moment passed, but it pounced at Sakura. She reacted quickly with an EX Uppercut. ”Kurae!” She shouted, the collision lighting up the alleyway and sending the entire beast up into the air, its puddle-like legs trailing beneath it. Sakura exerted herself and halted all of her momentum, sending the Brawn Yawn up while leaving her on the ground. She dashed forward and got underneath it. ”Here we go!”

”Shinku..!” She took a grounded stance, using her Revenge gauge to generate a large amount of Ki. The wind was kicked up and pulled into it as the fireball span. ”Tengyo Hadoken!” The beast was subsumed by fire and froze in mid-air for a solid second as the explosion rocked it in place, before it was sent flying out of the alleyway where it exploded into ash on the street.

”DAAAGH! Yeah! How’s that?!” She yelled. Sakura hopped forward and punched the air up and down. She finished off the pop-off combo with a final kick, that sent her sneaker flying off of her foot. She scrambled to retrieve it, hopping on her other foot.

Karin smiled and flipped her hair, surveying the field one more time and searching for remaining Others, or Midna.

Had she looked a few moment earlier, she would have seen the princess atop the roof stumble at the sudden reappearance of the flying other, a foot slipping on the slime of the bile pools, and her falling from the roof. She caught herself with levitation, no drop would kill this princess, but the Multiple Plateau Pendu beeding in on her well might.

The princess’s breath caught in her throat as she raised her shield and tried to ascend as multiple pinpoint accurate balls of lightning hurled forth … and slammed into the body of her Vibrava as it swooped in to take the blows for its mistress.

”No!” she cried out in alarm … only for all to be reminded or informed of the dragonfly’s deceptive typing, as it grounded each and every one of the shocks and came out of the body block completely unscathed. To add insult to injury, the ton covered creature launched a volley of homing spines like those of Midna’s shield.

”Oh… ha! You cant hurt it dumb birds” Midna taunted the Pendu as she lifted herself back onto the roof, before thrusting her ax forward and commanding her minion to ”Kill them! Kill them all!”

Thus, when Karin looked up, she found not a distraught Minda, but instead the twilight-vibrava blasting the Pendu with bright purple flames till their bulbs popped out (keeping it’s distance so they could not even think of meleeing it), at which point it darted in to deliver an almighty crunch directly to the exposed weakpoints. At the same time Midna had gone all in on handing off those foes to minions, and the portable fire was joined by purble lances as her initiate strikers staggered the Pendru who had to wait their turn to be picked off one by one by the shock resistant pokemon.

While they were at that, Midna cleared out the remaining Bile pools from the roof (quite literally, as used gravity to deal the final blows), while the guards popped open the shutters of the bunker again now that the Brawn Yawn was gone and picked off those still clinging to the alleyway’s walls.

Sakura stuck her shoe on just in time to roll out of the way of a falling Bile Pool. Some of the splatter got on her but gracefully turned to ash. Her heart rate was still racing and she was feeling the hurt, but it was nothing compared to the rush of total victory! She ran up to Karin and the two engaged in a mighty high five, though Karin was more elegant and reserved in her posture the force was there all the same.

”Did you see me?! Oh, man, I had to dig deep for that one. I just broke through a wall! I’m stronger than ever!” She cheered.

Karin nodded and listened, but she was already thinking about the tactical side of things. She was socially adept enough to not bring down Sakura’s victory high. So she just thought about Midna’s sub-par performance. For the first part of that fight she did nothing except prevent them from leaving the alleyway and act as a basic distraction. Considering the vast array of powerful magics at her disposal, something definitely felt off about that. Sakura and Karin were left mostly unsupported. How long would it have taken for Midna to clear out the alleyway of Pengu’s and Pools so Sakura could aid Karin in fighting the Brawn Yawn? Too long, she estimated.

Regardless, Karin strolled to the bunker door and rapped on it with her knuckle. ”This area has been secured, courtesy of the Seekers of Light.” She said to the barrels of the machineguns aimed the alleyway.

”Do you gotta keep advertising us like that?” Sakura asked, a laugh in her voice. She was in the alleyway and burning off energy with a routine of punches and kicks.

Karin just rolled her eyes and smirked. ”How are things in there? Is anyone terribly injured? We have means of transport.”

A hatch slid open and she was presented with the helmet of the very same captain who had spoken to them at the other gate, who had presumably run through the complex to reach and reinforce this gate.

“We’ve stabilized the wounded, and they won't get better treatment in here than anywhere close enough worth transporting them too” they responded, before pausing for a moment, looking from side to side a touch conspiratorially before making a gesture to a subordinate before finally adding, carefully “officially, I can’t condone this kind of vigilantism but … you have my, strictly off the book, thanks seekers. We wouldn;t have been to pull our people back before they broke in”

”Ah, that is good to hear. And of course, Naturally.” Karin nodded with a magnanimous smile. ”We do however, plan on sticking around, so hopefully we can begin working together in a more official capacity, yes?” She chatted casually, casting a look over her shoulder towards her allies.

As Karin handled the pr, Midna dealt with the last of the Others that had tried to slime away on the roof. Then she composed herself, taking a deep breath and releasing the combination of battle lust and fear stress based adrenaline from her system before she hopped down from the roof and floated down, her Vibrava somewhat noticeably still deployed even though the fight was over.

”You’re looking excited” she said to Sakura as she landed next to her, ”Good work handling that chompy thing, I knew you could”

Sakura swept her leg through the air with grace. ”Thanks! I feel great. I think I’m starting to get used to this whole life-and-death thing as long as I have two feet on the ground!” She said cheerily. She glanced over towards the noticeably human shaped indent she left on the wall. It reminded her of a feeling and she reached into her collar and pulled out a piece of debris and then brushed some out of the bangs in front of her forehead. Then she went back to punching the air.

”What about you? We got separated pretty quick, so I didn’t see much of you, Midna-san!” She asked.

”Ah, yeah, things went fine. Just fine” the princess who had gotten out of the fight with only mild water damage replied unconvincingly.

Sakura bounced in place, shifting her weight from one shoe to the other. ”Oh, yeah?” She was still in high spirits but noticed the tone of Midna’s voice. ”You did okay?”

”Mmmm … things got a little hairy, but this thing dealt with the awful zappy ones just fine in the end, and from their it was smooth sailing” Midna clarified a touch more truthfully, as she gave the Vibrava, which had landed on an outstretched arm, a little scritch behind an antenna.

”Oh, good! Yeah, those ones gave Karin a pretty bad shock. Getting electrified is one of the least fun ways to take a hit.” Sakura said. She also went to scratch the Vibrava.

Karin strode up at this point, giving one last wave over her shoulder. ”Ah, Princess Midna. Glad to see you unharmed. For a moment it seemed like we may not have the advantage in the alleyway, but the moment passed quickly. Did the enemy provide some kind of unexpected problem with your spell casting? I couldn’t help but notice the lack of your intervention.” She said. Though the natural tone of her voice tended to make a lot of what she said sound like some kind of subtle, haughty put-down, she was intending to politely ask what went wrong.

Minda pursed her lips, looked annoyed at the tone, then sighed and decided to be as honest as she could within hearing range of Midgar’s forces, which rendered said explanation a bit vague ”A… side effect which affected me more than I expected. Electrical attacks … don’t agree with my psyche. I found a sort of solution however with this one being unaffected by them” she again gestured to the Vibrava … an then pushed its head away when it tiered to nuzzle her comfortingly

Before Karin could respond, Sakura busted in. ”Ooh! I think I know how you feel.” Sakura empathized eagerly. ”One time someone tried to tie up my hands and I got really freaked out for a second. Like instead of getting punched in the face, I got punched in the mind. ”

”Like getting hit in a spot where you were hurt real bad before. It’s a scary thought!” She nodded.

”...I see.” Karin thought aloud. ”A side effect of what, if you do not mind me asking? Just so we can be more careful in the future.”

”That… is a good way of explaining it, yes. Thank you Sakura” Midna agreed, before adding'' ”Though in this case it’s more like …. Being hit in a palace that someone else got hit hard, if you understand what I am saying” while giving a sort of side nod towards the spirits of the Others as a way of explaining where the weakness was coming from without saying anything incriminating, being perhaps too paranoid about being overheard by the guards.

”Ah. I understand. We’ll have to beware these types of enemies in the future, then. Unfortunately they seem hard to avoid entirely.” Karin said.

”I’ll get better at dealing with them” Midna insisted

”Very well. I simply don’t know if you can help it, other than going to your fellow Princess for help.” Karin said, referring to Peach and her unique ability to defuse others.

The princess pursed her lips, and then shook her head, explaining simply that ”I get to much from that one”

”Then just keep it in mind.” Karin said.

Sakura seemed thoughtful, before hopping once. ”Oh, let’s check in with the others!’” Sakura said. She reached inside her white jacket and pulled out the radio from it’s safe hiding space.

Then she pressed the button, broadcasting her message to any Seeker with a radio.

”Hey! This is Sakura.” She said happily. ”Midna-san, Karin-san and I just finished getting some people to a bunker! And fighting some monsters. How are you guys? Where are you guys? Over.” She asked, waiting half a beat.

”By the way every time you get done using the radio, you have to say ‘over.’” She added. ”Uh. Over. Over for real this time. Over.” She looked at them both and winced.

Midna had to smile at that, her friend's silliness certainly helping pick her up her spirits, and she was more than happy to move on from the sore spot that was the issue she had with foes using electricity.

Speaking of them, the princess moved to scoop up the fallen Other and collect her dropped gun, despite how useless the latter had proved against the mix and match monsters (not that her lack of skill had really helped).

Once she was done she asked the pair ”Want any?” while holding a shadowhand out atop which the spirits of the 4 types of Others they had slain lay.

”Uh, no thanks.” Sakura said quickly, listening to the radio.

”I’ll pass as well. I do not want to ally with them, let alone fuse with them. If you wish to use your magic to manage whatever cumbersome items they drop, you may do so of course. I’m still trying to maximize the use of my grappling hook, anyway.” Karin said.

Midna shrugged, and then promptly clenched the shadowhand into a fist, crushing all of the spirits at once.

Once that was all settled, Sakura would try to enact her plan of using the radio to expediently reunite with the other Seekers and debrief. Professional! Sakura didn’t get to be professional very often.

Sakura's radio message

”Hey! This is Sakura.

Midna-san, Karin-san and I just finished getting some people to a bunker! And fighting some monsters. How are you guys? Where are you guys? Over.”

By the way every time you get done using the radio, you have to say ‘over.’

Uh. Over. Over for real this time.

Over.”

Young Justice

ICEBURN

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I C E B U R N

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| NAME |

Pei Huo

| AGE |

17

| MENTOR |

Green Lantern (Hal Jordan)

| DESIGNATION |

Y16

| APPEARANCE |

A pretty girl of east asian descent with pale, blue-tinted skin. She has short, naturally white hair, though she has dyed it with a few rainbow colored highlights. Her eyes are naturally brown but she usually wears light blue colored lenses to match the aesthetic. She’s about 5’4 and has a slender frame.

Pei’s tops are perpetually cropped in some shape or form. She usually dresses light, even in the coldest of conditions. Casually she usually wears sleeveless belly shirts and leggings with sneakers. Occasionally she’ll dawn some kind of hat, be it for keeping the sun out of her eyes or for some kind of…gimmick.

Her outfit is a frost resistant form fitting material. It’s two piece, once again a sleeveless, cropped top. She has a belt and leggings that tuck into boots. She has a pair of arm sleeves that connect into fingerless gloves. The base color of her outfit is black, but it’s still a somewhat colorful piece with pink highlights along the edges of the outfit. Such as around her collar, arms, sleeves, boots, and pants. On her back is a pink symbol. It looks like a cluster of ice crystals that resemble a crackling fire.

| BIO |

A metahuman, Pei was born unusual. She doesn’t know much about her biological mother or father as she was quickly given up for adoption. Born in North Rhelasia, now known as United Rhelasia, she grew up in a poor orphanage in a large city. Pei’s childhood was both one of making very close friends, and one of being bullied. With a large amount of other children, she often competed for attention. Many of the other kids her age were unhappy, and this combined with her attention seeking created a habit of Pei acting silly to both be the center of attention and brighten up people’s days. It also helped her cope with some of the fellow kids and most of the outside world looking at her so oddly.

Pei’s powers grew with her, she had control over them for as long as she knew she had them. She would often use them to perform tricks, labor, or steal to earn money for herself and her fellow orphans.

Eventually, at around eight years old, she was adopted by the wealthy Huo family, mostly for the normal healthy reasons, and partly as a PR stunt. To prove that, you know, Metahumans are people too and all that. Needless to say, going from being poor to being rich was quite the whiplash. Now she was living in beautiful, wealthy Coast City. The orphanage she came from also benefited from a large amount of donations from the Huo family.

Her new mother was strict and expected great things from Pei. She was expected to quickly learn English and advance her studies. This new regimented lifestyle had Pei missing the orphanage, but the new food she was able to get, for FREE, made her put up with it. It didn’t stop her from being something of a trouble maker. Thankfully her father was a little more lax, so the two balanced each other out. Pei also had some new siblings, a sister and a brother, of which she somehow ended up being the middle child. Her habits of being a natural attention-seeking entertainer were thoroughly the majority of her personality at this point and wouldn’t go away any time soon. During this time she also learned how to expand the usage of her powers.

Her father was a big time superhero fan and Pei first thought of the idea. In her homemade outfit she worked as a volunteer firefighter while in middle school. No combat, no putting herself in too much danger. Just controlling water and ice to an impressive degree and using it to help save lives. The positive attention was ‘better than cocaine’ as she tastelessly put it at the time.

This led her too, against common sense, push for bigger and bigger stunts. She loved the thrill, she loved the praise, and gosh darn it she loved helping people. This was it. Forget her studies, forget education- being a superhero was the life for Pei. It took a lot of convincing to her crying mother but Pei managed to get through to her. She would still complete a normal education of course…much more slowly. Now she wanted to kick some ass.

And so she did! Pei became the Incorrigible Iceburn, a hideous little joke of a name that almost made her mother reconsider this entire thing.
But it worked out. Ice powers were formidable and her control over them let her fight crime without hurting any one, and of course her youthful career as a volunteer firefighter continues to this day.

It was when Green Lantern, the defender of Coast City, had an out-of-control encounter with Hector Hammond, the grossest supervillain ever, that they crossed paths. Iceburn had already based some of her fighting style on Green Lantern, using her powers to create useful shapes and constructs.

She helped him defeat the villain and that was when he started ‘mentoring’ her in a very loose, Hal Jordan-y kind of way. She was absolutely NOT his sidekick, that was made explicitly clear.
Regardless, they crossed paths a few more times and Iceburn graduated to stopping criminals on a regular basis. She even got her first nemesis! Green Lantern even sponsored the development of her first super suit.

Unfortunately, a ‘secret identity’ wasn’t really much of a thing for Pei Huo. She kind of stood out wherever she went. Her parents were threatened by a local crime organization. That was a real wake up call that sunk to the pit of her stomach. But she really, really didn’t want to stop.

That was when Green Lantern suggested the Young Justice initiative. She could travel abroad and help people around the world, without putting her family at risk. Pei jumped on the opportunity. Besides, meeting a bunch of freaks like her would finally let her feel like she fits in! Though Mr. Jordan said that calling them ‘freaks’ probably won’t go over well. Even if it’s true.

| ABILITIES / SKILLS / EQUIPMENT |

Iceburn doesn’t use any tools or weapons, instead relying entirely on her powers. This may change in future as her experience and need for utility grows.

Creation Mist: Creation Mist, C-Mist, or just Mist, is what Iceburn calls the frothy, sparkling mist she can create around her body and expand along surfaces and through the air. She can concentrate this Mist into Ice shapes, at high impact if she so chooses. It mostly emanates from her feet and hands but can quickly become a thin but versatile layer on the floor, or a powerful but more concentrated cloud. The Mist is cold, able to slowly freeze water by itself without input. The Mist also provides a layer of protection against attacks, allowing her to make a few mistakes in combat without suffering incapacitating damage.
C-Mist spreads quickly along existing sources of water, and nearly instantaneously over already existing ice.

Burst: She can concentrate the Ice in her Ice shapes and force them to explode. This is where the ‘Burn’ part of her name comes from. Burst can spread C-Mist and do some serious damage if she is able to focus. Most importantly, Burst does no damage to herself, allowing her to use it in close quarters and aid in her mobility.

Cryo/Hydrokinesis: Any amount of water the C-Mist touches can be manipulated by Iceburn. This allows her much more power and versatility than pulling Ice out of the C-Mist, but she can fight perfectly well without an existing water source. Fortunately there’s almost always more water to be found to amp up her power. Her ice is much more durable and powerful than natural ice, letting her build or destroy quite effectively with it.

Temperature Control: She can control the temperature of water forms her Mist is in contact with. She mostly uses this to make her Ice room temperature so she can freeze enemies in blocks of ice without killing them.

| LIMITATIONS AND WEAKNESSES |

Heat: C-Mist cannot be generated in hot temperatures. C-Mist brings coolness with it, allowing her to generate Mist outside of hot places and bring it in with her, but she cannot create more or spread Mist in very hot places. If she is prepared she is more than capable of handling fire, basically hard-countering it if she is stronger than the fire. But, for example, artificial heat could be induced in a room to severely limit her powers. She’s also more sensitive to heat in general. As long as she has her wits about her she is actually more effective against fire or heat than other heroes might be. But catch her off guard and it can truly wear her down more quickly than anything else.

Power Reliant: Iceburn possesses a basic amount of martial arts knowledge able to perhaps beat up your average goon in a one-on-one fight, but mostly she just uses her powers. She hates martial arts and will never agree to a spar without being able to use her powers lest she be embarassed.

Mist: She can’t create Ice, nor manipulate the elements outside of the Mist, making her ‘spheres of influence’ very obvious to enemies. She can launch ice outside of the Mist but it’s easy to tell what she can and cannot control. The Mist can also be affected by environmental factors, though it has more staying power than natural mist.

Squishy: Make no mistake, she isn’t weak by any means. Her defensive capabilities are generally stronger than her offensive ones. If anyone could fulfill the role of a damage absorbing tank, it’s her. But supercede these defenses and Pei doesn’t have any enhanced durability of any kind, nor any regeneration factor. Basically, high armor, but no health. This gives her a particular weakness to surprise attacks. None of this ‘only human’ crap, either! What’s that even mean, anyway ‘only human’. Psht!
Sweets and Hot People: Her true kryptonite.

| NOTES |

Generally copes with stress using humor, doesn’t really know when to shut up in general. Sometimes she can get mean spirited, having developed somewhat of an ego as of late.
Disaster bisexual.
Has high levels of self-esteem. The world might be a better place if she was hiding some kind of crippling insecurity, but alas.

Character Relation (Under development due to not meeting anyone yet)

C H A R A C T E R R E L A T I O N S H E E T

Zatara

"Enil- enilwaj evisserp- erpmi! Erpmi? Damn, how does he do that?"
Anyone who wears a top hat is a-okay in Pei’s book. Magic is awesome, the real kind, not the ‘speaking backwards’ kind. That stuff is just fine. But the up close stuff! Pei is into that herself, so Zatara strikes her as a kindred spirit. Though the whole ‘cousin’ thing strikes her as nepotism. Just a little.

Cybergirl

"She’s kinda creepy lookin’. Sorry- on an existential level! I’m not tryna’ be rude. She just raises a lot of questions…"
Should a robot even count? That seems weird. She wished whoever built her just owned up to the fact that she was a robot instead of trying to be so realistic about it. Pei would probably like her a lot more if she had some antennae coming out of her head or something. Like Red Tornado! There’s a genuine robot. It’s the pretending that’s weird. Seems kinda phony…

Mirage

"Wow…a real life merwizard! If I could breathe underwater I’d walk around all day with a fish bowl on my head. You couldn’t stop me."
On first blush…Pei wouldn’t mind losing in a spar to Mirage. What a power set! She seems a bit on the serious side considering she’s a merwizard. The teeth are a little off-putting but, again, Pei is just happy to finally be a part of a freakshow. She’s definitely not the weirdest person in the room anymore! Though, she can mostly turn off her weirdness, so that feels like cheating.

Metamorph

"...Just so you know, I had physically stop myself from like, barking like I was a cartoon character. I reeled it in. That one’s for you, ma."
Handsomeness aside…this guy seems like a real hero! Cool powers, cool suit, and maybe, I dunno, a little confident?! There are way too many mopey superheroes in the world for Pei’s taste. …Too bad about the weird teeth though. Lots of weird teeth in this group. Kind of worrying.

Nymph

"What- a plant? Personally, I’ve never been very afraid of plants. Sometimes, I even eat them. Is she edible? Well, I guess we’re all edible if you try hard enough."
Another person for Pei to generally be less weird than! Though it’s almost cheating to be able to turn it off and on whenever you want. Pei doesn’t understand why people who don’t like fighting become superheroes. That’s literally the entire job. If you wanna change the world, be a politician or start voting or start rioting. If you wanna protect the world, you suit up and start throwing hands! (Figuratively speaking. Punching people is stupid.)

Rain

"So, Rain doesn’t count as a superhero, right? I feel like you need superpowers to be a superhero. Maybe a…medianhero?"
To be perfectly honest, in the limited amount of time Pei has had running in superhero circuits, guys like Rain make the best targets of teasing. Either they get really mad and respond, or get really stoic and try to ignore her so she can do whatever she wants to annoy them. It helps that this one doesn’t have any powers, so she’s pretty confident she tease him without consequence…she might let him get a hit in though just to be fair.

World of Light

wordcount: 2,543
Midna: level 8 EXP: //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////(146/80)
Location: Suoh
Warp Charges: 1 (+1 from fight reward)

warp locations

Virgin Victory teleport room
Top of the Split mountain
Outside the Convent of Our Lady of the Charred Visage
Tostarena Town

Sakura Level 9: 19/90
Karin Level 5: 3/50
Location: Suoh
Word Count: 2,543
Points Gained: 3
New EXP Balance--- Sakura Level 9: 22/90 (pending)

Karin Level 5: 06/40

(pending)

Peace, and cleanliness, did not last long. Because almost as soon as Sakura, Karin and Minda stepped out of the spa, an alarm blared through the streets and spread a controlled practiced panic through the people out and about. Several people rushed past the trio as the proprietor of the spa ushered her clientele out of the baths and into a conveniently nearby shelter (when you had to race to get dressed, you also didn’t want to then have to race through the streets as well). Had they not been pointed towards it, the three of them might have missed the shelter, its small unassuming entrance hiding a spacious and well furnished bunker deep within, while gaurds armed with assault rifles and manportable cannons peeked out of murderholes covering the entrance, ready to keep the Others out for long enough that proper help could arrive.

The trio declined the directions towards sanctuary however.

”Me and the ladies” Midna began to explain, as she taped a wall to open a portal to her home realm ”where thinking that the only thing to do after getting nice and clean” she pulled out her singular pauldron, secured it to her arm over the suit, then tied her green climbers bandana around her neck and donned the twilight hued fragment of psycho mask in place to cover the rest of her face alongside the helm ”is to work up a nice sweat”

”and what better way” followed by strapping her spiky shield to one arm, hand holding both it and a rosary with a frozen olive and golden mask fragment ”than to save the day” she concluded as she extracted obsidian fire axe, and the massive spiked clubba club and charged both of them with electricity.

She hoisted the massive statically charged wrecking ball with a glowing shadowhand, while resting the volcano fragment over her shoulder, and finally called out her mecha-wolf-bear-dran for support. The hulking cyborg with a cute Shiba tail brushed said tail against all three briefly, bolstering their attacking and movement speed, just in time for the sky to explode above them as the missiles and pods met in a calvocate of destruction.

”Shall we?” the princess asked the other two, grinning to herself just a bit too smugly for how dangerous things were about to get.

As for Sakura and Karin, the only gearing up they had to do was make sure their fighting gloves were fastened. Anyone who had ever been on the receiving end of one would know that they were not there for the benefit of their enemies. They were only there so that a fighter wouldn’t cut their knuckles- they did nothing to reduce the impact.

Sakura and Karin were both serious, but returned Midna’s enthusiasm with a similar pair of half-smiles.

”We shall.” Karin nodded, watching the skies.

”Yeah! Let’s go!” Sakura pumped her fist. ”I’ll just be happy to be fighting on solid ground again.”

A moment later, once they had judged the trajectory of the closest pod, and they were off, sprinting through the streets till they heard the sound of screaming, and rushed into a dimly lit hallway.



The screaming came from inside of a coffee shop that would normally be a little haven of solidarity for various fantasy races tucked away in the heart of human psychic town, but was at the moment a haven mainly thanks to having some impressively sturdy glass window covering much of the front.

It would not last much longer however. ”Over there! Oh- what the heck are those things?!” Sakura said, charging into battle, perplexed.

A small horde of buddy rummies were wailing on the glass window, cracking it in several places. The only thing after it between them and a meal of minds was a hasty pile of furniture, and behind that a few folks, human and not, who had to be forced to make do with this lesser shelter, who were holding improvised weapons that were all they had to protect themselves should the glass give.

Fortunately, they would not need to use them

”Hey, over here you … things, over here!” Midna yelled at the headless manikin like Others, right before she had her mecha-bear send them a flaming hot dish of goop via back mounted cannon.

The slime like Stu splashed down in the middle of the dozen or so Buddies, covering many in roasting goop and coating the window and ground around the front of the shop with a burning hazard. Yet while this did get the buddies attention, they certainly didn't care much about the fire after they had staggered out of it. Regaining their poise after only a few moments, they began to step forwards with a few elegant steps forwards ... which quickly devolved in a kind of swaying drunken gait as they came running at the the trio wielding arms of their own kind as a mix between a flail and a club.

Sakura and Karin took point, looking to defend their mage so she could maximize damage without worrying about defense. Both were fighting confidently. Sakura leaped over one Buddy and then another, rolling through the air before she landed in front of the barricade of the civilians. Two Buddies reeled on her with ungainly strikes. Sakura raised both of her hands and absorbed with strike with on arm, before returning fire with a series of jabs and short kicks, light on her feet as she alternated between them.

Karin spin kicked one Buddy, sending it crumpling to the floor where it began to squirm and regain its balance. Another one came for her and she dodged one strike, then another, before catching one of its limbs and flipping it over her shoulder. It roiled and nearly caught her with a wild, anatomically dubious attack. ”My word! How uniquely grotesque.”

”Weirdly durable too” Midna noted, as she took a moment to process the minor issue of how to avoid blowing her friends up with her magic, let alone the surrounding infrastructure. While doing so she formed up her equally lanky chilfos strikers, the tall frozen undead trading arm smacks for spear jabs. They did not deal much damage but the four durable strikers did helpfully tie up an equal number of their foes.

Midna and her Mecha bear then charged some of the rest. The Cybernetic ursine bull rushed one, while Midna jabbed the massive clubba club her shadow hand was holding forwards like a fist, the pair of them knocking back two more Rummies mostly to prevent them from being swarmed by the 13 on 3-4 odds they were facing, before going on the defensive as more came after them.

Even with all that tarpitting, the street fighters were still individually facing 3 on 1 odds.

Brute strength was hardly the most important factor in a street fighter, but Sakura found if she applied herself she could put down some serious impact. ”Shunpukyaku!” She span around, sacrificing speed on her attack to put as much force into it as possible. There was a gust of wind and the Buddy was knocked hard onto the ground with a bouncing impact that destabilized another one. She charged up a fireball and blasted it into ash. ”Hadoken!”

Kicking the third Other away to give her some space, she jumped and brought her hammer fists down on the downed Buddy crushing it into the floor. It’s- psychic brain came out?! It was like some kind of organic lightbulb that popped out of the top of its head. ”What the-?!”

It looked breakable. She stepped on it and the monster flashed red and cleanly disintegrated.

”They have light bulb- brain heads!” She called out unhelpfully.

Karin glanced at Midna’s work and then at the three Others facing her. Hers was a much more engaged process. She used footwork to get them all lined up. It took her a few moments and she slapped away several strikes in the process. Once they were all lined up and trying to get around each other, she pushed forward.

”Guren ken!” She pummeled them with alternating palm strikes as her legs carried her forward. They were all knocked dizzily aside. On the last one she span and drove her elbow into its back, knocking it into the recovering Rummies. She dashed forward and slid into them, feet like lances, breaking all three of their legs in quick succession.

”Mujin kyaku!” She juggled all three with two quick kicks, the Others like popcorn in a frying pan, and then slashed them in twain with one last spin of her heel. With that, the Street Fighters dispatched the monsters assailing them at the moment.

”I’m sorry- what was that, Sakura-chan?” Karin asked Sakura.

Any attempt at an answer right away was drowned out by rumbling thunder from Midna;s shocking strikes

She had started out by smashing two rummies to the side with a wrecking ball of a swipe with her massive shadow hand held mace, bowling them over into a heap, down onto which the charged mace sent three rotating pillars of lightning that juggled them into a fourth central pillar that kept them stuck in place.

Mace still held out to deliver its payload into two of her foes, the princess pivoted, blocked a flailing arm with her shield, causing a spray of needles to burst out in response. The hail of spines struck the rummy right as the princess swiped her obsidian axe around to hit it in the leg … which caused it to first burst into flames. She followed up with a second strike as the flames reflected manically in the lens of her mask, found it rather pitiful, and then stabbed the top of the axe forwards and delivered a blast of lightning that knocked the burning foe back.

She pulled the weapon back to her chest, quickly charging it back up a stage, and then fell upon the lighting juggled pair as they dropped, the princess swiftly hacking at each as they rose, igniting them as well. Which was all ever so fun, to the extent that she found herself giggling at the flames, but it did present a slight problem, which was she was now faced with 3 flaming rummies coming at her.

She dodged back from a strike, not wanting to introduce her plant shield to their now flaming spare arms, before crushing one by dropping her wreckingball of a club on it, tripping another with a crate pulled up from the twilight realm, and finally summoning her an upsized Vibrava to finish with a mighty crunch of its insectile jaws.

”Sorry, what was that Sakura-chan?” Minda echoed Karin’s question, as she reached out her shadow hand to grab the torso of the final of the three she had been fighting, physically holding it off as it burned to death.

Sakura-chan tried to get her voice over the din of battle. ”I punched one and a light bulb came out of it, and then when I crushed the light bulb, it- died! It went away!” She cupped her gloved hands around her mouth.

”A light bulb?” Karin asked.

”Yes! Look for the light bulb! It’s a weakness!”

”We seem do be doing all right.”

”Light bulb! Light bulb brain head!” Sakura called out as she ran to support Midna’s summon. She yanked one of the distracted Rummy Buddies and threw it over her shoulder and onto the ground. Out popped the Brain Crush.

”See, watch!” Sakura stomped on it, causing it to disintegrate.

Karin had slammed her palm into the chest of one of the Rummies and out the other side. As such her vision was entirely obstructed. ”Oh, I…right! Of course, the light bulb brain head. ” She said unconvincingly.

”Karin! You missed it!” Sakura held the sides of her head.

”What’s a lightbulb anyway?” Midna asked as she hurled the burning rummy she had been holding (and who’s flames she had been too focused on to see the demonstration) at the final other one of its kind still in the picture, two two falling together in a heap onto which her beleaguered mecha bear fell with ferocity, raising up on it’s hind legs before smashing its metal claws down onto them.

This kept them down for long enough for Midna to rush over and slap the palm of her shadow hand down on top of them both, squashing them flat …. Again without requiring any lightbulb smashing to end them.

”annnnd that’s the last of them” Midna noted as she casually dusted some ash off her new suit.

Exasperated, Sakura’s shoulders sank and she looked around. She raised a victorious fist over to the civilians to give them the all clear for now. ”Man…you guys.” She laughed and ran a hand down her face.

”Terribly sorry. It’s not as if I like seeing you embarrassed- well that’s not entirely true. But in this instance…”

Sakura shook her head rapidly and looked at Midna. ”Midna-san, you’ll see it. It’s like a bulb. But it’s got light inside. A lightbulb- it’s exactly what it sounds like!”

”We have more important matters to attend too, Sakura-chan.” Karin said, jogging over to the coffee shop.

”I know!” Sakura followed. ”I just hope there’s more of them so you can see it.” That came out entirely wrong! ”No, that’s terrible, that’s not what I meant!” She said, looking at the civilians in the coffee shop. ”I don’t hope there’s more of them- I just want to show- no it’s just- oh, what am I even saying?”

Midna had to stop herself from laughing at this as she tapped her dropped box and mace and sent them home for storage. Then she scooped up a shadowhandfull of fallen spirits while she walked over and tried her best to help end her friend’s tripping over herself.

”I’m sure we can find some more after we’ve escorted people to the closest bunker” she suggested, ”at which point you can show us these … glowing plant bulb things the Others have in them”

”Right. Thanks, Midna-san.” Sakura said, rubbing the back of her head and smiling apologetically.

The civilians gathered their makeshift weapons. ”Direct us to the nearest bunker, and we, The Seekers of Light, shall escort you there safely!” Karin said, standing up straight with her hands on her hip. She made sure to put extra emphasis on the group name. A sporty orc and a trendy elf exchanged looks.

Midna, steeped up, and, having exchanged bear minion for her Vibrava which she told them that ”My pet here can get some eyes in the sky and should help us steer clear of any more danger, and, well, I’d rather not leave you all with just that protecting you” she gestured to the cracked window that looked like it might shatter if breathed on. That was certainly enough to convince them to abandon their former shelter to seek out an official one. A few quick mutters and the survivors were in agreement that they’d make the run to safety.

“The nearest bunker is there-ish.” The elf said, pointing down the street.

”Good enough for me. Let’s go!” Sakura pumped her fist and led the way.