[X] Full frontal assault – Maybe if you and Vista hit him with all your might from the word 'go', Cadejo will decide fighting you is more trouble than it's worth.
-[X] Initiate Plan "Fish in a Barrel, just remember to always stay in the air out of reach.
--[X] Step 1: Drop Temporal Sludge on Cadejo and tell Vista to do everything she can to keep him in there.
--[X] Step 2: Drop Recursion Field
--[X] Step 3: Unleash the Wrath of the Sun on these dogs!!
Well, I've been thinking a bit and this does seem like a decent option that involves both us and Vista:
[X] Full frontal assault – Maybe if you and Vista hit him with all your might from the word 'go', Cadejo will decide fighting you is more trouble than it's worth.
-[X] Initiate Plan "Fish in a Barrel, just remember to always stay in the air out of reach.
--[X] Step 1: Drop Temporal Sludge on Cadejo and tell Vista to do everything she can to keep him in there.
--[X] Step 2: Drop Recursion Field
--[X] Step 3: Unleash the Wrath of the Sun on these dogs!!
[X] Full frontal assault – Maybe if you and Vista hit him with all your might from the word 'go', Cadejo will decide fighting you is more trouble than it's worth.
-[X] Initiate Plan "Fish in a Barrel, just remember to always stay in the air out of reach.
--[X] Step 1: Drop Temporal Sludge on Cadejo and tell Vista to do everything she can to keep him in there.
--[X] Step 2: Drop Recursion Field
--[X] Step 3: Unleash the Wrath of the Sun on these dogs!!
Just like on SB, people seem to be ignoring a very obvious option: layering Rust Seeker with Temporal Sludge and Vista's power to essentially trap Cadejo in the middle of nowhere. Think about it for a second.
Step one: drop TS on Cadejo.
Step two: use Rust Seeker to make some nice holes in the street surrounding the TS AoE. Eventually it makes a moat surrounding the sludge.
Step three: Vista uses her power to make that "moat" look more like you're on top of Thunder Bluff, for those reading Aqir and who know WoW. For those who don't, imagine a circular platform atop a pillar sitting roughly 300 feet in the air, with massive chasms between the platform and any other safe land to walk on.
Suddenly Cadejo is a sitting duck in the middle of nowhere (he can't fly, and getting his intangible dog-selves to the other side and BACK UP the Vista Chasm (pending copyright) is a slow job at best), which means the mooks can then be handled with ease, and Cadejo imprisoned because he's literally trapped on an island in the middle of nowhere unless you can fly.
Vista's power is some grade A bullshit, people, and more importantly she's very very good with it. Give Vista the chance to have some fun and she will surprise you.
Just like on SB, people seem to be ignoring a very obvious option: layering Rust Seeker with Temporal Sludge and Vista's power to essentially trap Cadejo in the middle of nowhere. Think about it for a second.
I hope there won't actually be anything between Samantha and Danny, I find the idea kinda creepy.
The question is, what to do about his goons, and how to ensure that Vista is safe?
Getting backup would be a good idea, so I added contacting Samantha to my vote.
[X] Full frontal assault – Maybe if you and Vista hit him with all your might from the word 'go', Cadejo will decide fighting you is more trouble than it's worth.
-[X] Initiate Plan "Fish in a Barrel, just remember to always stay in the air out of reach.
--[X] Step 1: Drop Temporal Sludge on Cadejo and tell Vista to do everything she can to keep him in there.
--[X] Step 2: Drop Recursion Field
--[X] Step 3: Unleash the Wrath of the Sun on these dogs!!
[X] Contact Samantha for backup, she should be able to arrive fairly quickly and could focus on the goons and afterwards helping Taylor and Vista deal with, or at least keep Cadejo occupied while retreating if Taylor's attack does absolutely nothing.
Let's close this up so I can get to writing this weekend, shall we? You'll notice that I've once again combined differently worded plans for my own convenience.
[X] Full frontal assault – Maybe if you and Vista hit him with all your might from the word 'go', Cadejo will decide fighting you is more trouble than it's worth. No. of Votes: 31
-[X] Initiate Plan Fish in a Barrel, just remember to always stay in the air out of reach.
--[X] Step 1: Drop Temporal Sludge on Cadejo and tell Vista to do everything she can to keep him in there.
--[X] Step 2: Drop Recursion Field
--[X] Step 3: Unleash the Wrath of the Sun on these dogs!! No. of Votes: 30
-[X] If that doesn't knock him out, cast Temporal Sludge and Strong Shield before using Vista's power to get both of us away as soon as possible. No. of Votes: 1
[X] Contact Samantha for backup, she should be able to arrive fairly quickly and could focus on the goons and afterwards helping Taylor and Vista deal with, or at least keep Cadejo occupied while retreating if Taylor's attack does absolutely nothing. No. of Votes: 1
[ ] Full frontal assault
-[ ] Plan Fish in a Barrel
Emigration 4.12
You level your staff at the Mexican villain who is already starting to turn grey. Time. You need more time. "Temporal Sludge!" you scream.
A jet of purplish-black color flashes from the end of your Device and hits Cadejo and his gang a moment later. A bubble of the same color pops into existence before anyone can react and then fades out of sight. Within a good sixty feet, everything has slowed down considerably. It's too bad that actually stopping time is outside your capabilities, but Perfect Storm has told you before that without a Rare Skill, whatever that is, it would take far too much mana to be feasible.
Unfortunately, all slowed time means is you get a better look at how Cadejo's body is distorting, human features melting away and huge eyes and long teeth pushing out from the smoky blur. One, two, three, four heads already, and what looks like another one currently forming.
"You slowed time?! How?!"
"Not the time!" you shout back. "Keep him in there! If he gets out of range, he'll be back to normal speed!"
The buildings slide away from the Mara Salvatrucha as space itself expands far beyond what should be in this stretch of roadway. One corner of your mind thinks that her complaining about a little slowed time is just a touch unreasonable considering her own powers, but then again, she hasn't started flying and hitting like Alexandria, either. Maybe her surprise is less unreasonable in that light.
The rest of your attention is occupied by the spell you're casting. Your orange triangle spreads out beneath you, then it spins around; slowly at first, but it gets faster and faster before exploding into a wave of not-light that sweeps over everything in sight. Colors become muted, and all the gangsters except for Cadejo vanish. They aren't dead, of course. It's just that you pulled the fight into an almost virtual space, a shadow of the real world. The way Perfect Storm explained Recursion Field, it was originally designed to let mages practice new spells without worrying about annihilating whatever was around them. It didn't take long for it to start being used for fights between mages in urban settings, allowing everyone involved to go all out without nearly as much concern about collateral damage. Parahumans aren't mages, but their powers should cause them to be affected the same way mages are rather than ignored like a normal person.
At least, that's the hope. It seems to have worked in this case, anyway.
By now, Cadejo has broken apart into six near-featureless canines of indeterminate breed. You can't even tell if they're dogs or wolves. They take off at third-normal-speed towards the edges of Temporal Sludge's effect, and you notice with not a little distress that they're making better progress than you hoped. "We need more space!"
"I'm trying! Whatever you did is messing with my powers. They're taking longer to work than normal."
…Oh. In hindsight, you should have expected that. Temporal Sludge slows down time itself, so it makes sense that the effects of Vista's powers would also be slower. "If you can't go wide, go deep," you order, floating away from the edge of the building towards the area of effect. You also make sure to stay up in the air. You've heard that Cadejo's dogs can run up walls, but you haven't heard of them flying. Stay up here, and you should be safe. "Turn the whole thing into a pit. I want them all in one place for this."
As the road stops looking like a plain of asphalt and starts looking like an antlion trap, you focus on the next spell you have queued up. This is one you spent a long time practicing in the simulator, but it's the first time you're casting it in real life. "All right, Storm," you breathe, "let's hit him with everything we've got."
«Agreed, Mistress. Target lock. Firing solution calculated. Begin ignition sequence.»
Sparks leap from the red jewel and gather together just in front of the tines. A wave of heat, and the tiny fireball, smaller than a single Flare Shooter, expands into something the size of your head. Yellow and orange and red, it looks like a miniature sun; it even has black sunspots and scaled down flares slamming back into its corona. In any other circumstance, you would think it pretty.
«Ready to fire.»
Glancing down to find the dogs at the edge of Temporal Sludge's effect and starting to climb up the walls Vista created, you nod to yourself. They're still close enough to hit with one shot. Your staff moves to point at the middle of the pit, and an ugly snarl crosses your face. It's time for bullies to taste the fear they all spent so much of their time spreading.
"Solar. WRATH!"
The sun explodes. A cone of orange and red flame shoots out, blocking your view of the targets from the sheer size. Behind you, Vista gasps or shouts or something. You can't exactly hear her over the roar of your fury made manifest.
Two seconds pass, then three, and the spell peters out. Smoke wafts up from the edges of the Ward's crater, and the asphalt farther in is actually molten and oozing downwards. A hemispherical firestorm still rages in the very center where your spells are interacting. If this spell weren't set to nonlethal, nothing short of Alexandria and the Endbringers would have survived.
But the six dogs still stand, and they're still running to get free of Vista's prison.
By now the dogs are far enough away from each other than your patrol partner can't drag them all together again, and that means another Solar Wrath is out of the question. Flare Shooter it is, then. Vista seems to catch on to what you're doing, and instead of focusing on the whole group, she goes after one or two at a time. The dogs find themselves running at each other, and between her twisted space and your homing bullets, you would normally have no trouble corralling the canines.
You realize what went wrong with Solar Wrath when your bullets zip through their insubstantial forms. Just turning into dogs is not that great of a power, but when those dogs are intangible? It gets a little harder to fend them off. You had hoped that maybe your magic would trump his parahuman powers, but it looks like that's not the case. You do remember that his teeth and claws are physical, though maybe so you try to blast those out of his heads.
No dice there, either. The bullets explode just fine, but while the dogs rear back from the force, they don't do anything else to him.
Now that he knows you can't hurt him, Cadejo must think it's safe to start taunting you. The five dogs aren't even trying to get away anymore, instead weaving through each other, biting your bullets out of the air, and generally showing off just how powerless you are. A Rust Shooter hits the ground at one of their feet, but as expected, it does nothing. Neither the road nor the dog is metallic.
Without warning, they turn around and run. Are they trying to lead you away into a trap, or maybe just split you off from Vista so they can surround you? A definite possibility, but should you follow them, they'll soon learn you aren't some glass cannon. Teeth and claws aren't enough to get through your Barrier Jacket. You conjure some more bullets and send them after the pentad.
Wait.
Didn't Cadejo break apart into six dogs?
Vista's scream of pain and horror spins you around, and you watch her fall off the rooftop, the last dog clamped tight to her left bicep. You rocket downwards, the distance between her and the ground shrinking far too quickly. Even if the fall doesn't seriously injure her, the last thing you want is for Cadejo to get his feet back under him. You grab onto her and whip around, skimming the asphalt and flying back up. The dog is still clamped on, claws scrabbling for purchase and raking through the spandex and skin of her torso in the process. Flare Shooter does nothing, slipping through him like smoke.
Desperate now, you almost send your bullet to explode against his jaw, but before you can do that, his sharp teeth finish their grisly work. Cadejo falls to the ground, a large chunk of Vista's arm still caught between his teeth.
Blood flies in thick spurts with each of her panicked heartbeats. You clamp your hand over the severed artery and fly as fast as you can towards the PRT headquarters, Recursion Field falling apart so you can actually reach it and the people inside it. You don't know first aid; you don't know any healing magic. The most you can do is get Vista to people who can help her before she dies in your arms.
A loud ringing fills your ears for a moment, and then someone picks up the call Perfect Storm made for you. "Console."
«I need a medical team waiting for us when we get there!» you scream at the boy hero who picked up. Not Bouncer, which leaves either Flambé or Cherry Bomb. «We ran into Cadejo! Vista's dying!»
So I thought long and hard about how to deal with this chapter. The big problem is that while my SVers discussed carrying Vista to a safe distance, only one person actually voted for it. Do I do what I think you want and ignore what you actually say, or do I do what you say and ignore that you've made a mistake in your votes? As you can see, I chose the latter. I'm being nice this time and only critically injuring her rather than killing her as originally planned, but this is your one save. Please be more careful in the future.
And because I just know someone's going to bitch about it…
This is one situation where Nanoha's destroy-everything-but-don't-hurt-anyone bullshit came back around to bite you. If you look through the series, any time Nanoha fired a Divine Breaker, she not only never killed anyone, bust never broke any bones, never damaged internal organs, she never even bruised anyone. Because nonlethal magic won't break bones, it also won't knock out teeth or break claws, which left Cadejo unharmed by Solar Wrath since he's otherwise, you know, 99% intangible.
For a while, it looked like you guys would actually win this fight, at least as much of a win as was possible here. Several of you talked about the possible legal consequences of hitting him with lethal force, which would have broken his natural weapons and forced a stalemate where you couldn't hurt him and he couldn't hurt you unless he turned back into a human and split again, which he wouldn't do nearby after you demonstrated that you could actually hurt him. Unfortunately, no one voted to go lethal, and like I say in Basics of Training on the very first post, once you train an attack spell to Adept status and make it nonlethal by default, you have to explicitly tell me that you want to kill with it.
That said, you did fight Cadejo, as ineffectual as your attacks were. Pick a spell, any spell.
The rest of your attention is occupied by the spell you're casting. Your orange triangle spreads out beneath you, then it spins around; slowly at first, but it gets faster and faster before exploding into a wave of not-light that sweeps over everything in sight. Colors become muted, and all the gangsters except for Cadejo vanish. They aren't dead, of course. It's just that you pulled the fight into an almost virtual space, a shadow of the real world.
By now, Cadejo has broken apart into six near-featureless canines of indeterminate breed. You can't even tell if they're dogs or wolves. They take off at third-normal-speed towards the edges of Temporal Sludge's effect, and you notice with not a little distress that they're making better progress than you hoped. "We need more space!"
"I'm trying! Whatever you did is messing with my powers. They're taking longer to work than normal."
Two seconds pass, then three, and the spell peters out. Smoke wafts up from the edges of the Ward's crater, and the asphalt farther in is actually molten and oozing downwards. A hemispherical firestorm still rages in the very center where your spells are interacting. If this spell weren't set to nonlethal, nothing short of Alexandria and the Endbringers would have survived.
But the six dogs still stand, and they're still running to get free of Vista's prison.
You realize what went wrong with Solar Wrath when your bullets zip through their insubstantial forms. Just turning into dogs is not that great of a power, but when those dogs are intangible? It gets a little harder to fend them off. You had hoped that maybe your magic would trump his parahuman powers, but it looks like that's not the case. You do remember that his teeth and claws are physical, though maybe so you try to blast those out of his heads.
No dice there, either. The bullets explode just fine, but while the dogs rear back from the force, they don't do anything else to him.
Without warning, they turn around and run. Are they trying to lead you away into a trap, or maybe just split you off from Vista so they can surround you? A definite possibility, but should you follow them, they'll soon learn you aren't some glass cannon. Teeth and claws aren't enough to get through your Barrier Jacket. You conjure some more bullets and send them after the pentad.
Wait.
Didn't Cadejo break apart into six dogs?
Vista's scream of pain and horror spins you around, and you watch her fall off the rooftop, the last dog clamped tight to her left bicep
Desperate now, you almost send your bullet to explode against his jaw, but before you can do that, his sharp teeth finish their grisly work. Cadejo falls to the ground, a large chunk of Vista's arm still caught between his teeth.
Blood flies in thick spurts with each of her panicked heartbeats. You clamp your hand over the severed artery and fly as fast as you can towards the PRT headquarters
So I thought long and hard about how to deal with this chapter. The big problem is that while my SVers discussed carrying Vista to a safe distance, only one person actually voted for it. Do I do what I think you want and ignore what you actually say, or do I do what you say and ignore that you've made a mistake in your votes? As you can see, I chose the latter. I'm being nice this time and only critically injuring her rather than killing her as originally planned, but this is your one save. Please be more careful in the future.
And because I just know someone's going to bitch about it…
This is one situation where Nanoha's destroy-everything-but-don't-hurt-anyone bullshit came back around to bite you. If you look through the series, any time Nanoha fired a Divine Breaker, she not only never killed anyone, bust never broke any bones, never damaged internal organs, she never even bruised anyone. Because nonlethal magic won't break bones, it also won't knock out teeth or break claws, which left Cadejo unharmed by Solar Wrath since he's otherwise, you know, 99% intangible.
For a while, it looked like you guys would actually win this fight, at least as much of a win as was possible here. Several of you talked about the possible legal consequences of hitting him with lethal force, which would have broken his natural weapons and forced a stalemate where you couldn't hurt him and he couldn't hurt you unless he turned back into a human and split again, which he wouldn't do nearby after you demonstrated that you could actually hurt him. Unfortunately, no one voted to go lethal, and like I say in Basics of Training on the very first post, once you train an attack spell to Adept status and make it nonlethal by default, you have to explicitly tell me that you want to kill with it.
OK, so:
1. This guy is a near-perfect counter to us, and we never stood a chance of actually winning, only a tie at best.
2. Vista getting hurt is down to two mistakes on our part: Not specifying lethality, and not getting out the vote on flight.
I'd say 'let's not forget that next time', but there'll always be a couple people who will.
[X]Shell Barrier
Protection for both us and those nearby us is incredibly useful, especially in a case of making a defensive/flying artillery position.
Desperate now, you almost send your bullet to explode against his jaw, but before you can do that, his sharp teeth finish their grisly work. Cadejo falls to the ground, a large chunk of Vista's arm still caught between his teeth.
We totally thought things through, though!
It's just that somewhere, 'pick up Vista' got lost in translation.
that's a big part of why I'm freaking out, I think. Because it feels like we made a reasonable choice and were screwed over by a procedural thing, even if that isn't actually true. augh.
Two seconds pass, then three, and the spell peters out. Smoke wafts up from the edges of the Ward's crater, and the asphalt farther in is actually molten and oozing downwards. A hemispherical firestorm still rages in the very center where your spells are interacting. If this spell weren't set to nonlethal, nothing short of Alexandria and the Endbringers would have survived.
But the six dogs still stand, and they're still running to get free of Vista's prison.
«I need a medical team waiting for us when we get there!» you scream at the boy hero who picked up. Not Bouncer, which leaves either Flambé or Cherry Bomb. «We ran into Cadejo! Vista's dying!»
Harsh. Aside from Vista possibly holding us responsible for her close brush with death (if she survives), we likely just lost a good deal of goodwill with the local Protectorate at best. Not a good day for us, disaster would be a better description.
Unfortunately, no one voted to go lethal, and like I say in Basics of Training on the very first post, once you train an attack spell to Adept status and make it nonlethal by default, you have to explicitly tell me that you want to kill with it.
We totally thought things through, though!
It's just that somewhere, 'pick up Vista' got lost in translation.
that's a big part of why I'm freaking out, I think. Because it feels like we made a reasonable choice and were screwed over by a procedural thing, even if that isn't actually true. augh.
Harsh. Aside from Vista possibly holding us responsible for her close brush with death (if she survives), we likely just lost a good deal of goodwill with the local Protectorate at best. Not a good day for us, disaster would be a better description.
While I doubt Vista will hold this against us, I do agree that we've given the Protectorate the image that we're a kid playing costume, or at least inexperienced, in a very adult war on crime. Samantha's probably going to be unhappy too.
I wouldn't call the day a complete disaster though: We gave Dragon plenty of data to prove we're using magic.
I do agree with you there. Maybe just a short reminder line in each vote section where combat spells can be used: ;REMEMBER TO SPECIFY LETHAL OR NON LETHAL SETTING'
Vista got hurt because getting her to a safe space got lost in all of the planning. It probably would've been better to use temporal sludge and Vista's power to move him far away and get out of dodge, but we didn't do that.
But shit happens and hopefully we can avoid any arguments so we can get Vista somewhere safe. Hell, this might turn into one of those points where we use PS to heal Vista by having it make her a barrier jacket. If it does, let's hope that Vista can be a magical girl.
Hell, let's hope that PS can make one quickly enough for it to matter.
Apparently if we went lethal we could have possibly ended him. At least I think so, might not be reading it properly. I did assume that we were going with the Lethal option though, so this confuses me.
This is why I didn't want Vista in the fight once the bastard was in the recursion field escape would have been impossible for him and we would have held all the cards but NO! people wanted to drag Vista into a fight with a hero killer when she was the weak link when it comes to fighting this guy
Apparently if we went lethal we could have possibly ended him. At least I think so, might not be reading it properly. I did assume that we were going with the Lethal option though, so this confuses me.
Several of you talked about the possible legal consequences of hitting him with lethal force, which would have broken his natural weapons and forced a stalemate where you couldn't hurt him and he couldn't hurt you unless he turned back into a human and split again, which he wouldn't do nearby after you demonstrated that you could actually hurt him.
This is why I didn't want Vista in the fight once the bastard was in the recursion field escape would have been impossible for him and we would have held all the cards but NO! people wanted to drag Vista into a fight with a hero killer when she was the weak link when it comes to fighting this guy
If we'd retreated and dropped Vista a ways away, Dog-guy would have had plenty of time to shapeshift and pursue us, and Vista would have been very cross with us we were treated her like a kid.
All we had to do was remember to fly.
That's the downside of bandwagons. People sometimes vote without thoroughly reading and thinking about what they're voting for, and then disappear until the next update.
