[] Attack Sparky. He has already shown he doesn't care about collateral damage.
-[] Tie up the Tinker and tattle to Dragon.
Thunderstorm 12.5
A few different options come to mind as you stare down at the self-assured Tinker. Destroying the cannon would be simple, but there is no telling what would happen if you did that. Maybe it would work out fine. Maybe it would explode. Maybe it would even spill out the nanites within, eating away at the building on which you stand and killing Sparky in the process.
The thought of trying to talk him down, admittedly an underused skill, is dismissed as soon as you consider it. From the way he is talking, you doubt telling him – again – that his plan just is not working would carry any weight in his deluded brain. No other argument you can conceive of should carry as much weight as what you have already said and had dismissed.
Fine, then. Fine. You have other options, even if using them is slightly worrying. You hope this is not about to bite you in the behind.
"Perfect Storm." Your Device beeps, ready for anything. "Ring Bind."
Circles of bright orange light up from nowhere and shrink down to clamp onto Sparky's wrists and ankles. A gesture dismisses your mana scythe, and taking a step back you watch with a very slight smirk as he tries to pull himself free to no avail. "What? What did you do?!"
"Nothing for you to worry about. Just stay there and chill out." All it takes is a few steps before the doubt starts creeping up again. This is an Endbringer fight, and you did just attack another cape participating, even if you did so with a very good reason. If only there was someone you could call to give you advice about what to do next.
Dragon picks up on the second ring.
"Calamity. Thank goodness you're okay." Her avatar scowls at you, and you cannot help but wince.
"Do you have any idea how scared I was when you hung up on me?"
"I'm really, really sorry about that. Between a nanite cannon being fired at us and Alexandria drop-kicking me out of the way, I was a little busy. But speaking of nanites and cannons," you hurry to say before she can scold you any more, "I actually need a little advice. I had a small chat with the Tinker who built the cannon in question. He's, uh, tied up right now so he can't do any more harm. I'm just worried that I might have broken the Truce in the process?"
Dragon's scowl fades into a thoughtful frown.
"Are those nanites the reason why the Zomok is now little more than scrap?"
"It's that bad?"
"The teleporter pads dissolved, along with the two capes they brought over. It progressed from there. I barely had enough time to send it away from Canberra before it ate the engines away. The nose and cockpit may be salvageable, but little else."
You blink and shake your head in surprise. That was worse than you expected, though now that you think it through it does not surprise you terribly. "Yeah, they're to blame. He designed them to eat
anything. Buildings, Endbringers, people, doesn't matter. They didn't do any good against Leviathan, and on the second shot he figured out how to blow them all at the rest of us. I tried to tell him that, but he didn't listen."
"They work!" Sparky shouts so Dragon can hear him. "Another shot, and I can kill him!"
Dragon opens her mouth and immediately shuts it as her eyes move to the side.
"Looks like you won't have the chance. Leviathan is retreating."
You breathe a sigh of relief. It is finally over.
The boost to your mood is only temporary thanks to Sparky's gloating. "Ha! I told you! I told you it would hurt him!"
"Actually, I think it had more to do with a very, very angry Alexandria." That takes the wind out of his sails. You are just happy Alexandria is safe. With the way the grey goo was covering her, you were not sure that would be the case.
"Don't worry, Calamity Witch. You don't need to worry about breaking the Truce."
"I know the Protectorate won't hold it against me, but that won't stop any villains from seeing it differently—"
"That isn't what I mean. You did not break the Truce in the first place." She must see the confusion on your face because she asks,
"What do you think the Truce actually means?"
You shrug. "Doesn't it mean no going after capes you have a grudge against, no arresting villains, that sort of thing?"
"That is often how it manifests, but that is not what it means. It is not just that we cannot settle judges or arrest people. It is a recognition that the Endbringers and other S-class threats are existential dangers. When a Truce is called, there are no heroes and villains, no teams, no grudges. We are just capes, and we are united against the monsters that want us all dead.
"Endbringer fights are always a risk. We are attacking with more power and less caution than at any other time. There is no telling what will happen when we try something new. As a result, an attack that injures or kills another cape, so long as you can prove that it was unintentional, will be forgiven. But they have to be accidental. If you try an attack and all it does is hamper our efforts to drive Leviathan away, and then you do it again, it is no longer an accident. When you told him his tech does not work, firing it any further would not be accidental, and his obvious intent to do so is sufficient to prove his guilt in this matter. He violated the Truce, not you. What you did was uphold it.
"I do thank you for bringing this to my attention, though." Dragon's smile turns devious.
"Just leave the Tinker there. Now that the fight is over, I'm sure Shipwright will be happy to impound the cannon and take it off his hands."
She said that loudly enough for Sparky to hear it, and you glance over to find him staring at you with wide eyes. "No! You can't do that! I need it to protect myself!"
Sharing a look with the world's greatest Tinker, you turn her screen and walk back to him so she does not have to shout to be heard.
"If you need a nanite cannon to protect yourself, then you have done something wrong as a Tinker."
"You don't understand! The Elite don't take no for an answer! That Kapoochi guy knows where my workshop is. There's no telling what he'll do to me!"
"Then you need to move your workshop and— Wait. 'Kapoochi'?" Sparky nods frantically.
"Taller cape, wears a big white hat and mask and an apron over a shirt and tie?"
"Yeah, that's him!"
"…You're afraid of a recruitment attempt by Capo Cucina?"
"Would you like to fill me in on who that is?" you ask.
"He's one of the founding members of the Elite, and Uppermost before that. Pyro- and telekinetic. He had a fairly popular cooking show before Congress passed the NEPEA-5 law that restricts parahumans from directly competing with regular humans in athletic competitions and entertainment. He is one of the faces of the organization," she added, switching her focus to Sparky.
"If he was the one to approach you, you got a soft sell."
"But, but, but— He came after me!"
"The Elite try to recruit all independent capes when they move into an area," Dragon says, and you can almost see Sparky's ego deflating.
"I'm sure the Protectorate would be interested in hearing about it in order to track their expansion, and they are always open to taking in Tinkers, but otherwise? You're nothing special."
You slowly turn to stare at her. A diss by the world's greatest Tinker? That has to sting. "And on that note, I'm headed back to pick up Samantha. We'll talk later when we all get back home."
The water is well on its way to receding as you fly over what was until a few minutes ago an active battlefield. The surviving fliers are assembled on a rooftop, and you touch down and blink at the strange scene in front of you. The capes are clustered around the Triumvirate; that is expected. What is not expected is how all of them are very carefully
not looking at Alexandria. You take a look of your own and smile to yourself.
You cannot say for sure which is the reason, but you expect it comes down to one of three things. Either it is Alexandria standing there without her helmet, the gaping eye socket the lack of helmet reveals, or the fact that some kind cape had to offer their literal cape so she could wrap it around herself like a towel after the nanites ate up her costume.
Obviously you came right at the end of whatever meeting was taking place, and everyone starts flying away to several other buildings where more capes are standing by themselves. Teleporters, you would guess, as there is no other way for everyone to get home. It is a long flight from Australia to the U.S.
You wave at Samantha to get her attention. "I saw the damage you guys did to Leviathan," you tell her when she walks over. "It looked like Breakdown really could hurt him."
The smile on your Guardian Beast's face slips away. "Yeah," she says slowly, "about that. We might have a problem with that strategy next time."
«
Message from TSAB,» Perfect Storm chimes in before you can figure out what to say to that concerning sentence. «
Request meeting. Does Mistress desire coordinates?»
«
Forward them to me.» It sounds like the talk of just what happened in Phantasm's alternate dimension will have to wait. Dragon and Tim will probably want to hear, anyway.
The Enforcers are waiting right where they said they would be. Perhaps it is because you first met them without anything hiding their identities, but the domino masks the same colors as their hair just look odd. That they are still in their normal Barrier Jackets just adds to the dissonance. "Welcome to your first Endbringer fight," you say, careful to hide that this is only the second one you have ever attended. "Now that you've seen them in action, what do you think?"
"I have to admit, I'm kind of surprised by how fast and resilient that thing was," Lanster says, pulling up several screens to reference something or other. "I showed you the image of the TSAB fighting the Book of Darkness, remember? It's one thing to hear about how difficult that fight was; it's something else entirely to experience it for myself."
«
Because that is exactly what I wanted to hear,» gripes Samantha.
You ignore her and ask, "Any ideas of what to do about them? Just keep hitting them harder, or…?"
"Since they're officially Class-2 Lost Logia, there is an option on hand that might work," Erga says. You do not know the man well, but the quiet and and almost cautious voice he is using puts you on edge. "The same thing that killed the Book of Darkness."
Lanster's expression turns grim. "The Arc-en-Ciel."
"The what now?"
Erga turns to look straight at you. "The Arc-en-Ciel. It's a spatial disruption cannon, literally tears apart the region of time-space it's fired at. We actually aren't allowed to fire it at an inhabited planet without approval from High Command because one shot, and definitely two or three, would wipe out virtually all life more complicated than a single cell."
Your eyes have grown wider and wider as he explained just what this cannon does. It takes you a moment to collect yourself before you are capable of asking, "A-And you want to shoot us with that?"
He holds up his hands. "No! No, no, no. We're not going to shoot you."
Well. That is a relief.
"No, what I'm thinking is if we could transport an Endbringer off this world to one of its neighbors," he continues. "The world we crash-landed on would be perfect. There are no humans or any other advanced species living on it that we saw in the time we were stuck there. I'd want to clear it with the Admiral first, but if we can get one to that planet, we should be able to ram the blast right up its backside."
"Great plan. I can get behind it." Erga and Lanster turn to Samantha, hearing as well as you do the unspoken 'but'. "But"—there it is—"there's just one problem with that. How are we supposed to teleport an Endbringer from here to there?"
"That would be the hard part, but we might be able to pull it off." Lanster minimizes one screen and flicks it to you. "Based on Leviathan's physical dimensions, if there were four mages all trying to shift him to the same set of coordinates at the same time, we should be able to move him. We can probably do the same with Behemoth, though that will be more difficult. A fifth mage wouldn't go amiss for him, just to be sure."
"We'd have to hold them still to do that, you know. Leviathan's quick, and Behemoth has an aura around him that kills anybody who gets close," you tell her.
"Yes. I said it was possible to teleport them." She taps her temple and makes the mask vanish. "I never said it would be easy. But, sad to say, it is not as if we are awash in good options."
Lacey's Linker Core rank increased to B.
"Sparky's nanite cannon" added to Key Items (Dragon).
As a side note, just because something is in Key Items does NOT mean Tim can't analyze it for Inspiration or Exotic Physics. Just wanted you to know.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It's technically a day early for Lacey's Linker Core to upgrade. I hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me. Now was just the best time to do this because it's spell learning time! For properly fighting Leviathan, Taylor gets two spells to Lacey's one. Please structure your vote as follows:
[ ] (Taylor) spell 1
[ ] (Taylor) spell 2
[ ] (Lacey) spell
Interlude next, then the AAR and we can be done with this crappy arc. 
