MAWS (IC)

[N/A]

[floatr][/floatr]

"Mayday! Mayday! Coast Guard, this is the Mary Jo Duffy! We need HELP!"

"Roger that, Mary Jo Duffy, this is Dispatch, what is the nature of your emergency?"

"SHARKS, lady! Friggin' SHARKS! Big sharks, small sharks, red sharks, blue sharks! If they keep head-butting the yacht like this, it's gonna tip over! And then my family's gonna be sharkshi-"

"SIR! I need your location so I can send assistance."

"We're right off the coast of Freedom City! I think that's Dixon Beach up there! Port Rega-AAHHH!!!"

"Sir? Are you still there? Sir?"

Summertime in Freedom City meant hot sun and cool surf. School was out, and the public beaches along the Great Bay were packed tightly with kids of all ages, from toddlers to college students. Dixon Beach was no exception, filled with revelers of all ages, looking only to beat the heat, blissfully unaware that their fun-in-the-sun was coming to a swift, finned, toothy end...

[Avenger Assembled]

Joan caught the radio broadcast at her desk at the Ledger, cocking her head as she heard the terrified screams coming through the radio report. The beach! Sweet Lord, it's ninety degrees on a summer Saturday! It'll be swarming with kids! Jumping to her feet as Fletch Beaumont strode out to dispatch someone to cover the emergency, she yelled, "Fletcher! I'm on this one!" She'd earned the right to call her boss by his first name in the wake of the fallout after the incident with the Scarab. "I need Tony to fly the chopper out there!"

[N/A]

High above Dixon Beach, the sight before Joan's eyes would make any parent's blood run cold. The sharp crescents of almost a dozen shark fins crested the waves of the incoming tide. The few brave lifeguards on duty, a credit to their profession, swam right into the path of the oncoming pack, desperately trying to retrieve the swimmers too young, slow, or oblivious to save themselves. One surfer was already being mauled by a massive great white. As the chopper descended in a circle around the scene, Joan got a better look at the sharks. A good enough look to see that not only were they a dizzying array of sub-species, ranging from the relatively small hammerheads and makos to that terrible great white, but some of them weren't actually sharks. There were fins coming out of their backs, and their skin had changed color and texture, but they swam with arms and legs, and their toothy grins adorned faces all too human. When she steeled herself for another look at the mauled surfer, she was surprised to find that the great white hadn't stopped to savor its meal. Instead, it sliced through the surf once more, followed closely by the surfer, who'd already begun to change...

[Avenger Assembled]

"Oh my sweet Lord," Joan breathed. Any ambitions she might have had of waiting for other heroes to arrive, much less the police, died when she saw the horrors down below. Unbidden, she remembered the tank at the Portland Aquarium, the horror of feeling her bones slowly beginning to dissolve inside mutating flesh..."Tony," she said peremptorily to the chopper pilot, "you need to set me down and switch over to medevac. Don't try and be a hero; stay away from the ocean. Just get people off that beach before those things start coming to shore! Put me down there," she said, "behind the lifeguard station! I know it's tough, but sometimes you've gotta be part of the story!"

It took some work to persuade the chopper pilot of that, but within seconds he'd set Joan down, awkward, cumbersome dress and all, and then taken to the skies again, his cameras recording everything to go in later articles. As he disappeared, Joan ducked behind the shelter of the empty lifeguard stand, the screams of terrified people in her ears, as the morphic molecules of her dress warped and shifted around her, pulling down into the skintight, heavily armored costume of Fusion!

When her mask closed over her face, she ran for the water faster than any human could, running _past_ the fleeing, screaming civilians as she leapt and dived into the water, her long, muscular tentacles already whipping around her body as she blasted seawater out powerful jets on her midsection, propelling her towards the sharks at fantastic speed!

[Avenger Assembled]

Fusion was in her element underwater, moving with a speed, grace, and power that Joan Collier had to hide on land now that her body was forever altered. But she wasn't thinking about that now, instead she was lashing out at the biggest and most ferocious-looking of the sharks, muscular tentacles wrapping around the mighty beast as she pulled, hard, around its midsection and head, tough shark skin ripping as blood leaked into the water. Still alive, she thought fiercely. Good. Maybe that'll get their attention. "Hey! Toothy McGee! I've got your blood right here!" she shouted under the water.

Just as she'd hoped, some of the sharks broke from their pursuit of civilians to attack the great white, though what she hadn't planned was on them attacking her. She hissed in pain as teeth closed on her arms, her bizarre mixture of octopus and human blood spilling into the water to further fuel the feeding frenzy. Spit! Some of them are still going!" Despite temptation, she burst from the sharks attacking her and rocketed towards those assaulting the beach, whipping the battered shark she still carried around like a club. Hah! Tentacle beats tooth!

[N/A]

Fusion's blitz caught the massive great white shark completely off-guard. It barely had time to react as her tentacles wrapped around it. It thrashed within her iron grip, snapping its jaws desperately in every directly, looking for a foothold. But with one mighty jerk, she felt its ribs break beneath her psuedopods, and it fell limply through the water.

Most of the shark pack broke off from their advance toward the shore, just as Fusion expected they would. Driven mad with hunger at the scent of the great white's blood, they soared through the water, razor-sharp teeth in jaws like vises clamping down indiscriminately on any flesh within range, both the great white's, and Fusion's. The morbid cocktail of her blood and the shark's was quickly being stirred into a full-on feeding frenzy, one which the high-powered jets in Fusion's muscles barely managed to launch her free from.

The few sharks which stayed the course still turned back toward Fusion every few seconds, snarling almost reluctantly. Their primitive brains almost registered surprise when, upon one of those angry, wistful glances at their missed meal, that same meal had sped up right behind them. Heaving with all her might, Fusion swung the great white's body in a series of downward arcs, pounding the three sharks of the vanguard into a pulp. Her tentacles whipped out to catch them as they began to sink beneath the waves.

[N/A]

The "real" sharks quickly overtook the infected sharkpeople, the pack slamming into Fusion with the fury of Hell itself. She'd lain waste to their vanguard, and now their fellows cut a vicious arc through the water, intent on sating both their hunger and their desire for vengeance in one fell swoop. Their jaws once again tore into her flesh and her tentacles. She was surrounded by snapping razor-sharp teeth in every direction. They were upon her in an instant. There was nowhere to run (or swim).

Yesss, thought Megalodon, as his aquatic puppets danced at his command. Feeed, my children. Destroy this interloper before she ruins everything!

[Avenger Assembled]

Fusion screamed as the sharks tore at her flesh, more of her blood spilling into the water. Aaah! Her heart pounding, images of being eaten alive rising up from the animal part of her brain, Fusion pulled herself together even as the animals all around her sought to tear her apart. I HATE SHARKS! She wanted to run, but she knew the monsters were closing up behind her, and distracting them was still all that was keeping them from the beach and the civilians there. She swam backwards till the sharks were all in front of her, then concentrated, waiting until all the shark-monsters in the water were closing in on her, then she vomited up a huge gout of black, inky fluid, filling the water with a blinding cloud of fluid.

[N/A]

The sharks, true and infected alike, herded together, as if guided by a hive-mind, and bore down on Fusion once again, hunger and rage in their eyes and razor-sharp death filling their blood-stained mouths. Nature's oldest killing machines carved path through the waves, intent on tearing Fusion limb from limb...and instead ran straight into the cloud of ink she sprayed right into their faces. Terrified and disoriented, the pack broke apart. Most of the sharks and sharkpeople alike drifted in random directions. A couple had managed to close their eyes just short of the cloud, and they emerged from the other side snapping and flailing. But the cloud had thrown off their aim and they swam wide, their jaws biting only into the empty saltwater flanking her. When the ink dissipated, a few seconds later, Fusion could see the sharkpeople, who had degenerated even further away from their human origins, clutching their eyes as they screamed.

[Avenger Assembled]

Under the water, mighty tentacles lashed, cracking muscular limbs against the fragile cartilage of the sharks. "I! Hate! Sharks! So! Much!" she shouted under the water to no one in particular. Maybe Fusion was new to Freedom City, but she was a veteran hero, a skillful fighter with extensive knowledge of underwater combat. "If you weren't endangered, I'd go eat so much shark-fin soup!" She was careful with the shark-people, trying to stun the mutates rather than actually hurt them, the better to get them back on land afterwards.

[N/A]

"RRRRAAAAARRR!!!" The massive navy-blue form of MEGALODON THE MAN-SHARK burst forth from the waves, beating and clawing his chest as his roar echoed across the beach. "KILL!!! SNAP YOUR BONES! EAT YOUR FLESH! DRINK YOUR BLOOD! BLOOD DEATH EAT REND BITE TEAR BLOOD KILL BLOOD KILLKILLKILL!!!!!"

He shot through the water like a torpedo, kicking his powerful finned legs behind him. He closed the thousand foot disance between himself and Fusion in an instant. He leapt up out of the water at her, close enough that she could see his eyes (each one nearly as big as her face) had turned completely crimson. Jaws wider than her shoulders, capable of swallowing her whole, snapped down at her as he sailed through the air in a downward arc. She managed to dive just in time to avoid being sawed in half by that bear-trap Megalodon called a mouth.

[Avenger Assembled]

"AAAAAAGGGGGHHHH!" Fusion screamed in automatic reply, vomiting up another huge cloud of ink directly in the giant monster's face. Hissing defiance into that terrible face, she lashed out with her tentacles a moment later, wrapping them tight, tight around Megalodon's cartilaginous midsection, her tentacles scraping against the shark's scales. "You want a piece of this!?! I'll give you more of me than you can handle!"

[Avenger Assembled]

Fusion lashed her tentacles around the shark-monster, gritting her teeth as he growled and snapped and rolled black doll eyes in bloody rage. You know, she spat at him underwater, real sharks don't get angry! You're just a poser with a glandular problem! And with that, she hurled him straight up, way up, tentacles lashing out of the water as she hurled the shark-monster as high into the air as she could, tentacles boiling all around the suddenly flying beast as she got ready for him to come down. When Megalodon looked down, he saw a fist waiting for him at the center of that forest of octopus-flesh. "GET OUT OF MY OCEAN!" she shouted out loud, punching him back toward land as hard as she could.

[N/A]

The bystanders, who by this point had made it to the shore thanks to Fusion's efforts, screamed in terror as MEGALODON THE MAN-SHARK emerged from the water. But those terrified shouts soon turned to cheers as the tentacled heroine nimbly dodged the behemoth's deadly maw and wielded his shark minions against each other like clubs. They erupted into applause as she hurled him into the air again and again, tossing him around like a rag doll. The savage brute's battered body slipped beneath the waves, his red eyes falling closed. Fusion dove in after him...

...and, while the aquatic hero was lulled into a false sense of security for one precious moment, Megalodon sprang back into action, sinking his massive jaws into her side and brutally tearing at her flesh. She beat her fists and tentacles down upon him as he twisted and jerked, sawing his dagger-like fangs into her. Finally, their frenzied melee came to a conclusion, and in addition to the stinging pain knifing its way up and down her torso, Fusion suddenly felt as though she'd had the wind knocked out of her. She looked down at her side, then over to Megalodon, then down at herself again. The two tentacles on her left side now hung from Megalodon's jaws. Where they used to extend from her midsection, now only existed tattered flesh and a cloud of blood, growing noticeably larger with every beat of her heart.

[Avenger Assembled]

Joan screamed in agony, hurt worse than she'd ever been in her life, the taste of her life's blood in her mouth as it poured out into the seawater all around her. Her home, where she belonged...no, her home was in her apartment with her family. She saw her husband's face, felt his arms around her, saw her daughter's smiling face on a spring afternoon in the rain. I love you Charlie. I love you Lois. I'll die before I let him get his hands on any children today. Tears of agony running down her face, salty as the water on her face, she raised her fists, glared at that monstrous, smirking face, and cracked a tentacle into his eye. "COME AND GET IT YOU SON OF A BITCH!"

[N/A]

"KILL..." The savage man-shark drifted away from Fusion, treading water. He only stroked with one arm, the other floating aimlessly in the sea. Fusion's own blood ran down his chin, in rivulets between his teeth. "You...me...should be on same side...both...superior...humans...soft..."

Tears of agony running down her face, salty as the water on her face, she raised her fists, glared at that monstrous, smirking face, and cracked a tentacle into his eye. "COME AND GET IT YOU SON OF A BITCH!"

"Hunt at my command...or die on my fangs!" Megalodon roared as he surged forward in one last, desperate attempt to bite Fusion's head off, only to run into her fist with a punch so powerful he went hurtling backwards, dead to the world. Well, almost...

[Electra]

Erin didn't spend a lot of time patrolling on the south side of Freedom City, which was a little weird considering where she went to school. She just preferred the closely spaced buildings of the downtown or the dense warehouses of the west side. But if she was going to be moving up to the big leagues, even for training, she figured she'd better know the city like the back of her hand. She was just turning her steps to head back to the school after a boring afternoon patrol in grueling heat when the mayday came over her belt radio.

In a moment, she was pulling a crude tourist map of the city out of her pocket, trying to figure out where the mayday was coming from. It didn't take long to figure out, but that was still precious seconds lost. By the time she arrived on the scene, the water was already slicked red with blood in a large circle, and there was something almost indecipherable going on out in the water. After a moment, the scene suddenly clicked and she recognized Fusion, a West Coast hero who'd been active... well, Erin remembered an alternate Fusion from her own world, but it was close enough for her to figure out what was going on. Fusion seemed to be winning the fight, but she looked like she might be in danger of losing her life in the process.

Wander was no expert in underwater fighting, but she was game, and there wasn't anyone else showing up at the moment, so she leapt into action. Fusion dealt a mighty blow to the shark monster, but it had a lot of momentum going, and it was hard to tell whether it was still trying to attack or not. Angling her body into a fists-first dive, Erin slammed into the back of its head, right behind its wide-spread eyes.

[Avenger Assembled]

The shark-monster cracked beneath Wander's fists, sinking beneath the waves as she carved dents out in the tough shark-flesh with her twin blows. As Megalodon slipped completely into unconsciousness, Fusion floated in the water, bobbing like a cork. "Hah! You...you take that, you son of a..." A little woozy from blood loss, Fusion's tentacles drifted freely in the water. "Hey, I know you!" she said, pointing with one good arm. "You're from Young Freedom. There are people in the water. People he mutated. We'd better get them out before they wake up. I beat them until they weren't moving anymore." And with that, she pulled herself forward. "Hey, I wonder if those'll grow back," he muttered, looking at her bleeding stumps.

[Electra]

"Hey, wait, wait," Wander interrupted, kicking through the water to catch up to the wounded hero. "Let's get you onto the shore first, then I'll go get those... um, shark creature things. Can you swim in on your own?" Erin's inexpert assessment said that Fusion was hurt pretty badly, but not in immediate danger of passing out from blood loss. She just hoped she was right about that.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Uh-huh..." Fusion waved her arms experimentally and began propelling herself back towards the shallows, a weak jet of water coming from the edges of her ragged mantle as she headed back towards shore. "Try and get my arms if you can," she added, "I don't...I don't know if they'll grow back. I never actually had them cut off before..."

[Electra]

"I'll take care of it," Wander assured her. "Go back to shore and elevate your feet, I'll be right back." Hastily, Erin paddled out and began rounding up the unconscious shark-beings, dragging them back to shore, two by two. She couldn't find the big one, and she couldn't dive deeply enough to get a good look around, not without spending more time that she wanted. When the last shark things were back on shore, and the sad amputated tentacles as well, Erin went over to Fusion. "I'm Wander," she introduced herself belatedly. "I used to see you on the news back when you were in Portland."

[Avenger Assembled]

"Nice to meetcha. I met your friend the other day, you kids are all right." She reached up with her right hand, then looked down at her missing arms. "He took my arms. I can't believe he took my arms...the only guy I know who can make arms grow back is in the Pacific Rim," she said, her voice blurry from blood loss, "Oh God, I'm gonna have to get metal arms put in! And I lost my phone! I need to call my husband...and my boss! Charlie's gonna see me on the TV and get worried..."

[Electra]

"Hey, it's okay, we'll get your arms put back on," Erin promised, looking around the beach. The police and the... whoever the beach patrol guys were had arrived by now, and were taking control of the situation with the civilians. Things were stable enough, for the moment. "And we'll find you a phone, too. Is there someone you want to go see, to take care of you?" she asked. "That person on the Pacific Rim, do you know where he or she is, exactly?"

[Avenger Assembled]

"Macek Island, it's...crap, I can't remember the GPS coordinates." She rolled over, staring at the place where her limbs had been torn away. "It's five hundred miles southeast of Osaka, in the eastern Philippine Sea. Big place, they built it out of a Lor starship that crashed there about twenty years ago. Half-mile high, you can't miss it. Why, can you fly? Always wanted to fly...can't pull off more than gliding..." She shook her head, looking around as the crowd began to gather and cameras began to flash. "Guess I can't do that anymore...never realized how bright those were..."

[Electra]

"Not exactly, but I have friends. We're getting out of here." Glad that her beacon was waterproof, along with everything else it was protected against, Erin activated the teleporter's recall function, gathering the wounded woman up in her arms so they would both be taken. They rematerialized a moment later in the teleporter room. "This is Young Freedom's base," she told Fusion, "it's safe here. Psyche?" she called, raising her voice. "Are you around?" Hauling in lost and stranded heroes was kind of becoming a habit.