The Unlikely Duo: Part 2

[MarkK]

The Emissary reeled under the waves from the blow.

"Success! It has stopped attacking the dock! ... Oh my very unfortunate head..."

He shook himself back into focus, making a beeline for the massive bulk of the creature's body, eyes narrowing, muscles straining, tensing to strike with undaunted vigor as he neared the massive, alien grostesquerie of its face..

Whereupon he poked it hard in one of its huge eyes. Twice. Adding verbally, for effect, "Poke, poke."

And then he rocketed away as fast as he had approached, spiralling outwards and circling the creature in loops quick and graceful enough to almost give an impression of dance, were these far different surroundings.

The creature had shown enough intelligence to make use of objects as weapons. The Emissary hoped that meant it had awareness enough to be aggravated, infuriated. He sought to draw more of its tentacles into lashing out at him, having the creature seek to reach for and crush him. He even flew in close enough to weave a close upwards spiral around those tentacles holding the yacht directly, hoping the squid would then bend them towards him, thereby dropping the yacht.

He sought to be as a silver shooting star, ducking, bobbing and weaving amidst a rising horrible forest of lashing tendrils, drawing them out, keeping just enough out of reach to encourage more and more to be struck out after him. Or at the very least, an argent mosquito that refused to be swatted.

[Barnum]

The giant squid's boneless body recoiled at being poked in the eye. It flailed about with its tentacles, trying to squash the silver interloper, but he was too quick. A jet of water blasted from the squid's undulating body as it moved away from the Emissary, far quicker than its size should have allowed. The beast then turned, released the remains of the yacht, and turned all of its tentacles in one direction, setting them to the task of crushing the life out of the Emissary.

[MarkK]

The Emissary ducked, weaved and looped, circling back, forth and through the thrashing tentacles until finally he took sight of them straining against each other, and the Squid's pause to attempt to untangle itself.

He flew over then to the still sinking half of yacht left intact, grabbed ahold of it, and arced upwards into the sky until he was a faintly shimmering silver pinprick in the horizon.

With a descent so fast then that the wind screamed around him, he hurtled back down, the yacht he held overhead in his arms swung downwards on a trajectory to coincide with smashing into the giant squid's face with a resounding boom, all his strength and the momentum of his fall focused into the blow.

[Barnum]

Instantly the sea was filled with murky blackness, a vile combination of blood, ink, and bile. The mass of tentacles went limp and began slowly sinking. The force of their weight nearly sucked the Emissary down with them, but the tempest was over almost as soon as it started. The waters calmed and the carcass of the giant squid continued its slow decent into the blackness below.

[MarkK]

The Emissary forced his way free of the mass, taking a moment once back above the water to rub his artificial muscles from the strain, with a very quiet "oof" as he caught out of the corner of his eye everything from news media vans to AEGIS response teams arriving en masse as a veritable horde. He was also just a bit dejected looking at the blood.

On sighting that some effort between AEGIS and Astro Labs had result in some massive and ornate.. thing he could only assume was some kind of containment and study device, he plunged back down to pull the squid's body back to where they could better reach it.

The effort of doing so ensured his coming up rather coated in ink, bile and blood, and so his statement to the media was brief.

"Ahm.. a giant squid attacked the docks, for reasons I'm sure will eventually come to light, but the main point for now is that it was stopped, I am sure that yacht was entirely insured, this ink feels quite thoroughly unfortunate to be covered in, my friend Celestia was able to evacuate and tend to the injured, and I am likely to be showering for the better part of a week. Thank you."

From a brief later investigation of events, he confirmed for himself that Agnes had indeed been able to stabilize the injured post evacuation (they were more badly off than was first apparent) and move them to a hospital for further care, directly responsible thus for saving their lives. He was entirely pleased that her first significant and non accidental outing as a superhero was something that could be put in the win collumn.

All in all, a mild concussion and finding out that giant squid ink is beyond the power of mortal dry cleaning services was a small price to pay for what turned out to be a very good day after all.