Psychic Smasher 3.3.2
Calamity Witch down, B1.
You grunt and try to shift some of the rubble around as best you can with all your limbs pinned in place. A building, you've come to realize, is heavy, even if it's just one story that's sitting on top of you. An alert pops up just inside your vision, warning that the stress is too much for your Barrier Jacket to bear and that the personal forcefield will soon lose the integrity that is the only thing keeping you alive. «Samantha», you send, «can you teleport me out of here?»
«"No. I can't.» The Guardian Beast's mental voice cracks, and you can almost hear tears falling. She's angry, too, more than you've ever heard her be before. «I'm digging down right now. Just hang on! I'll get to— Hey, what are you—!»
That last message worries you, but not as much as the newest alert. The collapse of your Barrier Jacket is now imminent, too-cheerful pink letters counting down the thirty seconds you have left.
Your mask has adjusted to the minuscule amount of light leaking through the cracks; that is the only reason you can see what looks like incredibly dense black smoke pouring from between the chunks of building. No, not smoke. Solid black in the shape of a hand, and it isn't going around the rubble so much as through it. The hand feels around blindly for several seconds before the wide-splayed fingers brush over your face.
A massive wrench, and you're out. Well, maybe 'out' is the wrong word. You drop several feet and land heavily on your back. White smoke has gathered into shapes reminiscent of the crumbled walls, but they offer not even a whisper of resistance when you float through them.
What greets you is not Brockton Bay, and yet it is. The buildings around you are those you saw just a couple of minutes before, but wide gaps dot the walls and everything is crumbling and faded. It reminds you of a TV special you watched years ago with your mom, some mockumentary thing where mankind vanished overnight and the narrator showed how animals would evolve in the next five thousand years or so. You remember that the view of the cities looked a lot like this.
"Looks pretty awful, doesn't it?" You turn to look at the speaker, whom you can only assume is the one who did whatever this is. For all that she is a cape, she doesn't dress the part, clad as she is in a jacket and jeans. The lack of costume, however, can't hide the fact that she is blurry, parts of her body going in and out of focus without any discernible pattern. What's more, you would swear that the parts that do come back are different than those that disappeared. "Only way I could get you out of there." Glancing over, you are a little confused when you can no longer see the pile of smoky rubble. "Feeling okay?"
"Better than I would have if you hadn't pulled me out. My forcefield was about to fail when you got there."
"Glad to hear I could help. Now let's get you back to the real world. You won't do much good stuck in here with me."
You aim a glare in the Simurgh's direction only to freeze at what you see. The Simurgh is the smallest of the Endbringers and looks like an eldritch angel, but what is visible over the rooftops before you is neither of those. Instead there is a gigantic white tree stretching up, up, up into the sky. Branches sprawl overhead with leaves shaped like wings; rather than fruit, the limbs are heavy with eyeballs the size of buses. While you stare in shock, the tree slides soundlessly around another building. "What. The hell. Is that?" you finally manage to ask.
"That's what the Simurgh looks like here," the cape tells you. You look over to find her watching the moving tree. "I can see what she looks like in the real world, and she and that have moved together the entire fight. I think I saw a couple of leaves shrink a little bit when Eidolon hit her with some glowing-buzzsaw-thing, but I can't be sure about that. It may have just been how it moved."
"Still good to know." And you still don't know this woman's name. Stretching out your hand, you tell her, "Wish it were under better circumstances, but it's nice to meet another hero. And thanks for saving my life. Seriously. If you ever need anything from me, just give me a call. I'm Calamity Witch."
The distorted cape gives you an uncertain once-over, but then she grabs your hand and pumps it once. "Phantasm."
The world cramps again, and you're back in the real Brockton Bay. Phantasm is gone, all that's left of her a silhouette with ragged edges that flutter and flicker like flame. The outline twists in what might be a nod, maybe, and then she slips through you like a ghost to run deeper into the city.
"So glad he's gone." You look over your shoulder at Samantha and Vista, who was the one who spoke. "There's villains, then there's creepy villains, and then there's him. But," she sighs, "he did save your life, so I suppose there's that. Doesn't make him any less disturbing."
You take to the sky, your focus on the next building with people in it, and Vista appears on a nearby rooftop, stepping from building to building. "She didn't seem that creepy to me."
"She? Okay, whatever. You don't have to feel how space twists around her. I can feel people, even if I can't move well around them, but with her, it's like there's just a hole." Speaking of twisting space, your dozen Flare Shooters split into two groups, blowing apart the doors on opposite sides of the street. Evacuating these families takes less time than the last one did, and just like before, Samantha gathers them all up around her and vanishes back to the PRT headquarters so they can get on the bus waiting outside to take them to Boston.
Young Buck down, D8, the armband states, the first words you have heard it speak since announcing that you were trapped. Breakdown down, D8. Young Buck deceased. Breakdown recovered. Shielder down, D8. Breakdown down, D8.
Breakdown, the cape who single-handedly wiped out the Slaughterhouse Nine. You can see why the Simurgh would focus on him. If he's as dangerous to her as he was to—
Something rumbles, the sound increasing steadily.
Intrepid deceased. Brandish deceased. Breakdown recovered. Velocity deceased. Shielder recovered. Hallow deceased. Chubster deceased. Kid Win deceased. Woebegone deceased. Piledriver deceased. Alexandria down, C5. Legend down, E8. Menja deceased. Krieg deceased.
What the hell is going on over there?!
You shoot upwards, followed quickly by Vista, and what you see leaves you in shock for the second time in far too short a span. The Simurgh has changed strategies, and rather than dodge the blasts everyone throws at her, she has uprooted five different skyscrapers and ripped them apart into rubble. That rubble is swirling around her in a spherical shell so thick that the Endbringer within can barely be seen. The brief glimpses you do get show her to have something big and shiny in her hands.
"That can't be good," Vista says in a voice of flat horror.
The curtain of debris falls, revealing the device the Simurgh was working on. Five chunks of glossy grey metal, some of the irregular sides with holes or posts in the middle, are fitted together in a shape something like a sideways Y. Motes of glowing green light appear nearby the shapes and coalesce around the edges to give them a haunting glow. Multicolored beams of light come from somewhere on the ground, undoubtedly where Legend is. The Simurgh pulls the gadget close to her chest and wraps her wings around it, taking the attack on her feathers; once it is over, she shoves the now even more brightly glowing device into the air and twists something internal with an alabaster hand.
A translucent green bubble explodes into existence and sweeps through the air like a nuclear blast.
+1 training to Strong Shield (4/4 Master).
+2 training to Temporal Sludge (2/4 Adept).
Can I just mention that I hate Endbringer battles? I wasn't a fan of them in canon, and they are hard as hell to write. Unfortunately for me, the ramifications of this arc are kind of important for the plot. And now, the important question:
What do you do about this newest curveball?
[ ] Fly straight up and outrun it.
[ ] Throw up Strong Shield and tank it.
[ ] Drop down and take shelter behind a building.
[ ] Grab Vista and protect her with your Barrier Jacket.
[ ] Write in.
