ic So Great a Cause (2015)

[April]

Being worried for Erik was making the dryad a little testy and it took a tremendous amount of willpower on her part to not snap Dragonfly's or Miss A's heads off, verbally and physically.  This technology stuff was outside Willow's comfort zone, she knew that and acknowledged that, but being treated like a mere beast of burden brought back some uncomfortable memories.

Still, she remained silent and did what was asked, grabbing the heavy cable and moving it where it needed to go as effortlessly as carrying her own child.  The armor that had encased her, by this point, told a different tale of her ire.  It was sleek, with a dark bark covering and razored thorns while small purple flowers--foxglove--wove themselves into her hair.

Edited October 22, 2015 by Nick

[alderwitch]

How Bombshell had ended up trying to smooth everything over, the once-spy wasn't entirely certain of. She turned to watch Willow go and marked both her flat expression and the tone of her armor. Well, she'd gone poisonous. That probably wasn't the most positive of signs. Summoning up a pleasant expression for the two scientists, she offered a winsome smile, "I don't suppose one of you could translate for the laymen in the room? I'm afraid while I've picked up a great many things, super science is forever beyond my reach," Bombshell offered as she turned to follow Willow and the cables she was hauling making sure that it didn't snag on the path. She didn't think the dryad needed any help but the gesture probably couldn't hurt. 

"Do you think you'll be able to drain the barrier to open the portal?" Bombshell asked, the question perhaps obvious but she'd found that the science folk could quickly go down the rabbit hole without explaining things like 'imminent explosion probability' until a bit later than most would like.

[Gizmo]

"Unbelievable," Jill groused as Spellbound suggested a likely explanation for the lack of communication. Part of her wanted to work herself into a full-on rant over it but Dragonfly's apology brought her up short. With a sigh, she admitted, "It's not your fault, hon, it's not like I ever asked you how she was doing or anything. I'm just... I'm worried and I'm letting it get to me instead of doing anything useful." She could feel the muscles between her shoulders tightening even as she said it, every fiber demanding that she be doing something rather than just standing around waiting.

Grumbling to herself more than anything else she got out of Mara's way and let her work on a way to get them through the barrier. Walking over to where Willow was moving equipment, she brought a series of small force fields into being, placing them under the length of cable trailing behind the dryad for support. "Here, hermana, you shouldn't have to shoulder that by yourself."

[Electra]

"The barrier is pure energy," Miss Americana explained absently to Bombshell, not taking her eyes from her work as she deftly soldered a circuit board with her fingertips. "The portal itself is also energy, but of a different kind, and one we don't want to risk destabilizing by draining the first energy. Say you've got a plastic bottle," she continued, "and the mouth of it is plugged with wax. Easiest way to get the wax out is to melt it and drain it away, but you have to be careful, get the temperature just right, or you melt the bottle too, and you've got to control where the molten wax goes so nothing gets burnt or stained. I'm working on the temperature gauge and Dragonfly's controlling the wax flow. It'll work." That was terse and absolute, it would work because she would not allow it to fail.

Miss A took the finished circuit board and slid it into a housing, whose screen lit up and began displaying readings. She gave the machine to an Emerson robot standing nearby, letting it roll close to the portal and take further scans. "All right, I think I've just about got the frequency isolated." 

[Fox]

"Potentially lots of wax," Dragonfly supplied, either clarifying or muddying the metaphor. Willow and Jill had gotten quick but entirely sincere thank-yous as they laid the cable out, and it hadn't taken her long before she was zipping to each of the cables' ends to wire them into...something. The city transformer had been partially gutted, turned inside-out to give her access to things rarely seen, while the other end was connected to a knee-high device that looked something like a blooming onion of metal and glass, each piece - from her quiet muttering - apparently operating as some kind of capacitor and transformer.

"Directing wax is easy. Give it a place to flow. But it has to go somewhere; don't really have the infrastructure on hand to dump it if we don't know how much....wax. City main grid, though. Especially this city's - should be able to handle major surges, redistribute load." The armor-clad engineer gave her creation one last once-over, gently pushing one of the rings to make sure it could rotate freely. "Going to give a lot of people a lot of free power, drop their electricity bills. ....or blow out every circuit breaker in the district, cause minor utility damage. Either/or, good odds. Ready when you are."

[Avenger Assembled]

Dragonfly and Miss Americana's joint efforts paid off as far as they could tell. Draining the energy blocking the small vortex did let them pump a tremendous amount of what turned out to be raw cosmic energy into first Dragonfly's transformer, and then the larger power grid, giving them access to what turned out to be a gateway into the past about the size of two basketballs held together. Dragonfly's spatial warp sensors were able to detect that the gateway had a range of about two thousand miles - and narrow the location of the other end down to somewhere in western North America. The temporal detectors that Miss Americana had begun carrying since her own brush with time travel let her detect the chronal energy of roughly one hundred and fifty years, give or take a decade on either side. To actually get more information, they'd have to send a probe through - or perhaps find a way to expand the temporal fissure. 

Rechanneling the cosmic energy made quite a light show; it was hard to see clearly through the foilage that Willow had erected outside their little group, but the lights outside did indeed flare brightly before suddenly going dark, and Dragonfly's transformer was glowing with a silvery light as it absorbed a fantastic amount of energy that Dragonfly had seen before, energy that she had encountered while inside the brain of a planet-sized 'preserver of worlds' - 

And then suddenly one of the Archetech employees did something unexpected. He came up behind Liz fast and wrapped an arm around her neck, pressing the blade of a screwdriver from his toolbelt against her side; "You!" he called to Dragonfly, his voice resonating far deeper than Terry Fontaine's usually did. "Restore the temporal barrier! Or she dies!" He certainly had a lot of moxie for a weedy-looking middle-aged disaster technician - which in fact was what he was. 

[alderwitch]

Bombshell had been largely at loose ends save for trailing after Willow and Jill. She wasn't the science-y sort, nor able to lift much more than her own body weight so it was that or twiddle her thumbs. She was almost grateful when one of the ArcheTech employees went rogue. As he started to leap for Liz, Bombshell faded into the shadows. Ghosting up behind the man on silent feet, she shifted and then pivoted turning on the ball of one foot to send her other heel right into the back of the man's skull just as he finished his threat. It was delivered with precision. He'd have one hell of a headache when he woke up but he would wake up. As the man went down like a sack of bricks, Bombshell reached out one hand to snag the screwdriver he was using and present, hilt first, it to Liz. 

To the unconscious man she commented, "Thanks for that. I was starting to feel downright useless." She said, her clipped tones dry, "I think we might just be under attack."

[Ecalsneerg]

Liz had only barely had time to react, fingers clenching hard on her wand, whole body tensing. She took the proffered screwdriver, expression blank, and glanced down at the unconscious man. "Huh. That's odd." She cracked her neck. "Is this like, why you guys encourage bantering? Because I'd've just shot me in the back."

She whirled to the rest of the group, cocking a switch in her hand. Lightning began whirring and arcing through her wand, a little bit of dust shaking out with a couple of jolting thuds as the battered old weapon came to life. "So... reckon they need a new ArcheTech PR campaign? ArcheTech: we won't try to stab you with a screwdriver."

Edited October 26, 2015 by Ecalsneerg

[Electra]

Miss A glanced quickly at Dragonfly to make sure she was all right, then knelt next to the unconscious man, ignoring Liz's sarcasm entirely. She gave the technician a quick examination, using one of her fingertips as a flashlight to check pupil response, but he was quite unconscious She summoned two of the other support team members who hurried over, giving the heroes a wide berth with looks of faint unease. "Take him back to HQ, get him to the infirmary and have them keep him restrained until he proves he's rational, then ask him what happened. All of you go, we don't need any more targets." They nodded and fetched a floating stretcher from the van, quickly bundling the stricken, and stricken, technician away. 

"So something out there doesn't want the barrier down." she mused, rising fluidly back to her feet. "I'm guessing our guys might be in more trouble than we'd hoped. But there's only one way to find out." 

[Gizmo]

Jill had taken a step in Liz's direction instinctively as the threat had appeared but Bombshell had dealt with the turncoat technician before she'd even been able to decide on a course of action. Mouth twisting sourly, the medic made her way closer to Dragonfly, partly for reassurance and partly to stand guard. "Great. Mind control. My favourite." The astute among them were able to deduce that mind control, in fact, was not her favourite at all from the way her fists clenched and unclenched at her sides and her eyes darted about the space Willow's barrier had enclosed. She did still spare a glance in Talya's direction and when it became clear that nobody else was going to actually say it called out, "Hey. Good job stopping him before it could escalate. Fast moves." It came out in more of a grumble than she'd intended but it was clear that was from her overall mood and not directed at the blonde.

[Fox]

Dragonfly's self-recrimination for her slow reaction to the mind control was clear to see: even with her face hidden behind her armor, the feeling was written all over her body language. She'd been too slow, too distracted by the lost friends and interesting science to consider the angles. Mind control was out of left field, but an infiltrator, a plant, an attack from elsewhere...one gloved hand tightened into a fist as she rolled a perfect memory back over anything she could have missed.

As fast as she fell into that spiral, though, Jill pulled her right back out. The fist relaxed and became a reassuring hand that fell over her girlfriend's waist, followed quickly by a gentle hip-bump; the armor spoiled the familiarity of the act a little, but it was the thought that counted. Hopefully. "Very fast. Expertly handled. Plus, know we're on the right track now. Wouldn't bother stopping us otherwise - easier to let us blow ourselves up. That, though," she added, gesturing at her device - still glowing, still spinning gently as it modulated leftover energy and converted it into something that wouldn't cripple city infrastructure too badly. "That is no good. Cosmic energy. Glad Miss Americana and I both covered the exotics. Estimation of enemy weight class probably just went up, or they found something potent to play with. ....still. Barrier's down, now. Can do something about it. Got some readings, too; other end of the portal's displaced, but not too far; mix/max puts it...mmh." She paused for a moment, tapping a finger against her leg as she called up the readings and did some math. "....not here, too much strain. That way," she pointed, audibly frowning. "That's, what, west...ish. Too far to be here, not far enough to hit ocean. Not far enough up to hit space, which is good."

Edited October 27, 2015 by Fox

[Avenger Assembled]

Suddenly, the ground beneath their feet rumbled , alarms going off in the few remaining cars still in the parking lot. Suddenly a fiery form erupted from under the asphalt itself, sending fragments of molten tar flying everywhere. Burning bright and standing on black asphalt that melted at her touch, the too-bright figure was just barely recognizable as a human woman beneath a blue-white flame that erupted from every fiber of her slim frame. "Aucune forêt ne peut se tenir avant L'incendie!" she declared as she raised her arms, and with a whoompf suddenly the plants and other barriers Willow had summoned to help keep away tourists were burning to so many ashes, flames racing across them with the speed of lightning, the security barriers set up by the Archtech crew proving equally vulnerable to the sudden, carefully controlled forest fire! 

 

A moment later, a heavily-muscled figure in a black, yellow, and red jumpsuit crashed down into the middle of the small group of heroes, a sinister smile beneath his big, bushy black mustache. "Save some for me, Genevieve!" he called with false bravado before he lashed out at Jill O'Cure with a fist the size of her head, trying to catch her in his meaty grip. He laughed, not looking put off by his brief failure. "You should have listened to the Master, ma petite." He licked his lips with a feral intensity, locking eyes on Jill that looked not simply wicked, but with a soul behind them that reveled in that wickedness. "Now you're gonna know the Fury of La Bête!" 

 

Overhead, a man flew by in white robes almost too fast to be seen, his garments recognizable as a traditional panling lanshan to anyone looking too closely at the masked figure, his cracked porcelain mask obscuring his face. But no one was looking at his face, not as a beam of blazing white energy shot from his hands and blasted up the ground at Willow's feet, cratering the pavement and making the whole area shake with the sheer power of the blast! When the dust cleared, the man (riding some sort of personal dragon?) was gone - but the hole he had left was deep enough to see the sewers cracked up beneath! 

[alderwitch]

Bombshell turned to offer Jill a brief smile of appreciation but before she could brush off anything with a glib comment there was, of course, the requisite fire and chaos. What would an evening be without it. She vanished, falling back into the shadows as the miscreant's attention was focused on Jill. She popped out of cover to crack her baton across his broad back. It didn't appear to do any lasting harm, more's the pity, but at least she could be something of a nuisance in his quest to pummel Jill O'Cure. "I think, perhaps, you misunderstand the effect that fires have on a forest. Most do. L'arbre cache souvent la forêt."

[Electra]

Miss Americana kept an eye on the ArcheTech van as it sped away, then turned her attention fully towards the fight. "I don't believe I recognize any of you," she commented mildly as she pulled apart and reassembled the tool in her hands while barely sparing it a glance. "Second or third stringers, I suppose?" She'd turned the device into some sort of gauntlet and slipped it onto her hand. "I'm afraid we're really busy right now, though, so you're just going to have to go be inadequate elsewhere." Extending her hand, she shot a highly focused beam of red light into the one who'd attacked Jill, hitting him square in the chest. 

[Gizmo]

Jill probably shouldn't have been nearly so glad that an appropriate target for pummeling had presented itself but it was certainly more cathartic than waiting quietly for the analysis of the portal to be completed. "Sorry, Betty," she called out as she jumped out of the way of the mustachioed malcontent's initial attack, pumping her arms so that the sleeves of her jacket hiked up past the elbows. "Was that fury or furry? Because they make creams for that." Without ever coming to a full stop she launched herself back toward The Beast, just behind the ruby glare of Miss Americana's laser. In contrast, sickly green light crackled around her right hand, swirling about her fingers like a miasma and speckled with dark spots floating throughout the foreboding glow. She planted her palm right on top of the spot marked by the laser blast and the light leapt like lightning into her victim, the veins on his exposed skill turning black and varicose as his own immune system attack him from within. "And maybe you need to think about how you're @#$% with the wrong people!" she shouted right into his face, more loudly than she'd intended.

[April]

"This attack is ill-advised."  Willow said, looking unfazed by the large hole that appeared at her feet, her head swiveling to look at The Beast and The Fire.  There was a dangerous look in the dryad's eye as she looked on their opponents, and though her voice was as pleasant and lyrical sounding as ever, JIll and Bombshell could detect an undercurrent of anger.

 

"I won't ask you to surrender," she continued, leaping over the hole in the ground and closing the distance with The Beast.  "I have been at wits' end for over an hour now.  Frankly, I need this."  With that, she joined the others in attacking the Beast.

[Fox]

Dragonfly brought her suit defenses up as soon as their foes had appeared, silently grateful that they'd both not targeted her and not hurt anyone else; she should have expected something like this - another missed risk to worry about later. For now, her suit lit up and the world wrapped in around her as she disappeared.

"They're not wrong, you know," came the familiar, filtered voice...from behind 'La Bête'. Had he the opportunity to look over his shoulder he might have just barely seen her sword, a long blade of neon blue energy forming an inch off the knuckles of her fist, before it plunged into his body - slicing straight through his torso, shoulder to hip, without seeming to harm flesh. Or, at least, without seeming to cut flesh....

Dragonfly vanished again as soon as the split-second cut was complete, reappearing in the sky overhead. The blade dissipated even as her wings burned to life, twisting into being behind her to keep her suspended as she took to the air. "You are really, really bad at picking fights."

[Avenger Assembled]

Dragonfly's proximity alarms suddenly went crazy - the wild beeping that told her of a bogey, incoming fast! But before she could reach, suddenly something grabbed her in the sky, hard enough that the alarms screaming now were damage sensors as plates buckled and energy crackled against her own skin. A moment later, the force pulled her out of the sky, smashing her against the concrete just a few feet away from the melee with the Beast with tremendous force, actually digging a crater in the pavement like a child falling into packed snow. But this was not snow, but steel and asphalt! This was another damaging blow, hard enough now that some of the alarms had gone quiet - because of just how much damage the armor itself had taken! 

 

"HOLD!" declared Dragonfly's assailant as he revealed himself - and revealed that the heroes were in a great deal of trouble. A god had come to the West End; his silvered full-face mask, his red and black costume, his billowing black cape - this could only be Mastermind, the mighty would-be world-conqueror who had fought the Freedom League, the Vanguard, and many of the other mightiest teams of global heroes. "There need be NO war between us! My Atavisms and I have come on this day to SAVE all of mankind from the greatest of all the foes of humanity - the TERMINUS!" 

[Ecalsneerg]

Spellbound had tried to duck out of the melee. They were all waaaay out of her league, she was not cut out for a melee on this scale. Also, she was pregnant. 

 

But seeing some asshole burst out of the sky and attack Mara? And then start monologuing about his motivation? Hell to the no. She pointed her wand at Mastermind, rolling her shoulders, knuckles popping as her other hand made a fist. "Hey, asshole, pro tip? Don't smash people into the concrete while monologuing about peace." She pressed a button and a bolt of lightning surged towards Mastermind, detonating inches from his face in a blinding flare of incandescent light, searing at the ancient villains eyes even through his mask.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Argh!" Mastermind growled in surprise, clutching at his face, his aristocratic bearing stolen from him in a moment of surprise. The heroes couldn't see his face behind his full silvery mask, but as he wobbled briefly in the air, it was clear he couldn't see them, either. 

 

"Maître!" declared the Fire, flames coiling at her fingers. "Si vous ne serez pas parler avec le Maître , vous allez parler avec ses atavismes lieu !" She hurled a ball of flame at Spellbound's eyes, trying to repay her tit-for-tat, a flash of fire that exploded harmlessly in Miss Americana's face when the fast-moving patriotic paragon intercepted the blast with her own body. "Merde!" she added in a fiery curse when her blast had no effect. She took off into the air, leaving a flaming trail behind her as she went. 

 

Suddenly, a shadowy form appeared behind Spellbound - a tall, angular woman dressed all in black, her bone-white skin a contrast to a tightly-fitting black jumpsuit and cape, her eyes rimmed with black kohl and short black hair in a bun atop her head. "You strike a king, you best kill him, girl!" she taunted before hurling a blast of her own at the helpless Spellbound - a wave of slow-moving shadowy flame that erupted from her hands towards the pregnant former villain. "By the flaming shades of der Schattenwelt!" Bombshell leaped forward to catch this one and caught the flame across her torso, and - disintegrated. 

 

As Talya's ashes hit the ground, the Beast pulled himself to his feet. "Oh merde , regardez ce que vous avez fait aujourd'hui !" he shouted at the Darkness before leaping over to where Dragonfly was still pulling herself out of the crater, wrapping a massive arm around Dragonfly's neck, so close she could smell his sweat and blood all mixed together. "You had better stop before I throw this one into the sewers!" he called to the other heroes. 

The last of the Atavisms made his appearance now - flying quickly on what turned out to be a miniature white dragon. In his traditional Chinese robes and immobile white mask, the Withering landed behind the Beast, turning to hurl a blast of glowing white light into the Beast's back, making the powerhouse's already-healing wounds zip closed even faster, as if his healing was being accelerated as if he'd been placed on fast-forward! "Or you will wither," he hissed in a stage whisper that reached the ears of the heroes, heedless of Talya's still-drifting ashes. 

[Electra]

Making the decision to dive in front of the first attack aimed at the brash young pregnant woman was easy, Miss A did that practically on reflex. But she wasn't fast enough to stop two attacks, or to do anything to save Bombshell before she seemed to dissolve in a rush of fire and ash. For a second, a split second, Miss A's face went totally blank, her body slackening. 

 

Across town in a nice home in Hanover, Gina opened her eyes and gagged a little. "Oh my Jesus," she murmured, then steeled herself and dove back into her mental link. 

 

"You want death?"  Miss A called to the shrinking Darkness, raising a defiant hand. Red, white and blue lasers shot from her fingers, boosted by her gauntlet until they were almost too bright to look at. The beams slammed into the flying villain, sending her tumbling through the air helplessly. "It's too good for you." She turned and scooped Spellbound up into her arms as though she weighed nothing. "You can't be here," she told the spellcaster. "It's way too dangerous."

 

Taking to the sky, Miss A flew through the darkened streets like a bullet, till she caught up with the white ArcheTech van she'd sent away minutes earlier. The driver, well trained and experienced, immediately stopped the van when she dropped into the road ahead of them and set Spellbound on her feet. "Take her," she instructed the techs. "Keep her safe. I'll call you with more instructions." And then she was off again. 

[Gizmo]

Jill shouted as Dragonfly plummeted from the sky, an inarticulate sound of fear and outrage drowned out by the sound of metal impacting with pavement. Her breath hitched in her throat for a split second and things began to move so quickly, too quickly. The crackling bioelectricity of her force field was forming around her fingers as Miss Americana placed herself in front of Spellbound and had begun to take shape as the woman in black attack but she was too slow, too slow and Bombshell was just gone. No supposedly mortal injury she could magic away, no second chance or last minute save; she'd been too slow to act and Talya was dust.

 

And then the first of her murderers tried to take Mara hostage and Ellie would be damned if she'd hesitate again. She crossed the distance between them in the blink of an eye but it was still more than enough time for the light around her fingers to turn from blue to sickly green with a violent crack of ozone. Her left hand grabbed onto the arm around Dragonfly's neck and dug in, purple-black bruises springing instantly into view under her finger as another surge of malevolent energy surged into the Beast. As his strength weakened she pried the arm away and shoved her right hand into his exposed throat, completing the terrible circuit. The hulking man's skin paled and his veins bulged, turned a horrible sanguine shade while something milky yellow began to dribble from one nostril and into his moustache.

 

His knees buckled and still she held on, teeth bared and power flaring. He staggered backward with a strangled moan but she didn't let go. His eyes rolled back in his head as he lost consciousness and only then, unnatural green miasma circling all the way up to her shoulders, did she let him collapse to the street.

 

She took one step forward, just enough to place herself between the injured engineer and the man in the white robes, hot, angry tears staining her mask. When she opened her mouth a faint green-white mist rolled out of the corners like sulfur from a dragon's maw. Her voice was oddly clam and level compared to her earlier shouts, a grim promise rather than a threat. "You think you're the sickness? I'm going to tear you apart cell by cell and drown you with your own liquefied heart, you goddamn murderer."

[April]

"No."

 

It wasn't a scream--merely a whisper--but one with a note of heartbreak that all present could hear.  The protective armor covering the dryad's head had peeled back to reveal the anguish on her face, a tear welling up from her amber eyes and streaking down her cheek while her hands flexed as the wind carried the ash of someone she loved past and through her fingers.

 

Those same amber eyes narrowed, the armor encased hands flexed and the fingers became as claws.

 

"I am going to kill you all," the dryad stated, her usual melodic tone sounding harsh and discordant while the ground heaved and the pavement buckled.  Massive roots surged up from the surface sprouting leaves, flowers and thorns a small forest oasis in the middle of a city block.  "And nobody will remember you, nobody will mourn you, because they will all be afraid of what I will do to them.  From your rotted corpses, flowers shall grow."

 

The flora exploded into violent action all around Willow, indiscriminately grabbing at friend and foe alike.

 

"Twice you took from me that which matters most," Willow hissed.  "Never again.  Not me, or anyone else.  Never.  Again."

 

[Fox]

Dragonfly had had better days; in the space of under a minute she'd gone from fine to crushed to humiliated to held hostage to freed to bound up. It took most of her lingering attention span to silence her suit's internal alarms - she was well aware her chest plating was compromised, she could feel part of it digging into her ribs. Or her ribs digging into chest plating...she wasn't entirely sure which she'd prefer. And from what little she could gather, mind scattered and trying to play back things she'd missed while playing meteor, she'd gotten the good end of this fight....

Three times her suit lit up, and three times it accomplished nothing - each ended in a horrible screeching noise, metal on metal, as something in her suit tried to spin up to speed and failed, power and calculations incomplete. In the end it left her worse off than she'd started, something small and metal ejecting from one gauntlet with force that spoke of raw, violent tension; the jewel-like piece occupying the center of her chestplate had already been cracked, but as the space she was trying to bend destabilized it nearly broke in half, emitting traces of what would have been smoke if smoke was neon blue and smelled like ozone. It curled its way through the vines, reaching for the sky but dissipating before it got more than a few feet.

 

"JiL###$$$$-" Ah, and her voicebox was damaged. That, some grim part of her mind observed, that she could fix. "##..$...Jill. Pretty much stuck. Can't see or hear much, think you're still there. Thank you. Love you. Go get them."

[Avenger Assembled]

"I had hoped _you_ would be wiser, sister," declared Mastermind as he reached down and began to pull at the bonds that held his left leg in place, the concrete that held the viney roots in place beginning to crack and bend. "The loss of one life is nothing beneath the salvation of the human race!" 

 

For her part, Fire cursed in French and burst into a hotter flame, her glow shifting to a nearly blinding white as the trees and branches that held her in place began smoldering and crackling. Any natural bonds would long since have snapped by now, but Willow's forest still stood. For the moment. 

 

Over across the way, the plants surrounding the Withering were beginning to die, vines and branches burning and blackening away just as they had when they'd nearly ensnared Jill. He fixed his masked gaze on Jill O'Cure and laughed. "Only a murderer? You flatter me, child. You'd better save your tongzhi instead of taunting me - canned meats will go bad."

 

And the Darkness, the shadowy flame-witch who had started all the trouble? She teleported out of the snare with a poof of dark energy, appearing a few feet in front of where she'd been bound a moment later. "Dryad!" she called to Willow, her burning black eyes fearless as she glared down at Min. "Here I am! Kill me if you dare! Show the world that one life is all it takes to make the good turn cruel."