ic So Great a Cause (2015)

[Electra]

Miss A chose that moment to return from her errand, trailing red, white and blue sparkles that were far more impressive in the darkness than during her normal daytime flights. She took in the scene, then sneered at Darkness, which was a very unusual expression for the image-conscious paragon. "Show the world? Sister, you're not even a footnote to history. And there's no better oubliette than Blackstone's bottom floor." She extended her hand again and blasted, not where the villainess appeared to be, but where she had been, back in the plant snare. The illusion dissipated abruptly as Darkness slumped in the snare, unconscious and hanging in the air. 

[Gizmo]

"Diu nei," Jill shot back at the Withering, flakes of dead, blackened bark drifting in the air between them as their respective powers killed off any vines that got too close. Love you, too, hun, she thought inwardly, resisting the overpowering urge to go to Mara and see to her injuries immediately rather than continuing the fight. They'd killed Talya, turned to ash in an instant and while the rage of it burned in her stomach like a hot coal fear over what else these monsters might do if given even a moment to regroup roared through her veins above all else. Outwardly, though she remained fierce and immutable, her attention on her white robed opponent. "What's it going to take before you idiots figure out threatening her is off the table?"

 

Evidently the question was rhetorical because instead of waiting for an answer she surged forward and caught the Withering's wrists in her own hands. Just as it had with the Beast sickly green energy flowed into her target but unlike his brutish companion the Withering was not without appropriate defenses. His own abilities pushed back, the air around them crackling and chilling as the very microbes floating unseen around them were snuffed out. Jill gritted her teeth as they grappled on a cellular level, gaining the upper hand momentarily as she forced the Atavism to stumble backward on suddenly weakened legs.

[April]

It was fair to say that Willow was functioning in a fugue state; Darkness' fall only earned a small frown and a quiet by furious corner of her mind thought it was better this way--it wanted Talya's murderer awake when the limbs started coming off.  As if ticking things off a list the dryad's attention shifted to Fire, who was making short work of the ensnaring vines.

 

The vines surged and rapidly drew the fire based flier toward the ancient guardian, who met her with a devastating blow.  Unfortunately, Fire's flame had already demonstrated how well it could burn through Willow's wood and her armor burst into flame.

[Avenger Assembled]

Screaming in fury and disbelief, the flaming Atavism tore herself free of the binding plants. The flames didn't just free her - they wooshed across the battlefield, burning away Willow's hard work into so many ashes and freeing all the villains from the bonds she'd put on them. The Beast was already down and the Darkness fell towards the ground, landing with a solid thump on the nearby concrete, but the others were now back in the fight. 

[Fox]

Dragonfly had been waiting. Despite her kind words to Jill, in fact, she'd been seething; it hadn't kept her from getting her suit systems almost sort of sorted, in as much as she could without correcting for physical damage, but she'd only stopped straining against the vines when she noticed them start to go slack. She couldn't see or hear them, but she knew she couldn't have been the only one caught up in Willow's ire, and in the giant tangled knot of plantlife she could feel the tension of others fighting their bonds. Probably not the ones she wanted freed, but if they were going to do her work for her....

 

When the vines burned away, she was ready. Feet spread, she looked at the Mastermind and brought an arm up - the arm above what amounted to her good ribs, today - and pointed straight at him. "Hey. Hey," she called out. All around her space bent and twisted, suit sparking as it warped physics to deposit more than a half-dozen small drones in the surrounding air. They followed her finger to look up into the sky, cyclopean eyes fading neon red. "#### you."

The crater lit up with the light of an engineer's ire.

[Avenger Assembled]

Dragonfly shot Mastermind in the face! 

 

For the second time in the space of a few minutes, the immortal manipulator of men, nations, and cultures cursed in surprise as a blast of energy hit him right in the head; this one blowing his face mask off entirely. The classical beauty beneath might have been worth studying under other circumstances, but as it was he flashed his piercing blue eyes and clenched his rugged jaw.

 

The Withering, losing his fight to Jill, suddenly stepped backwards, briefly making her stumble and pulling them both out of the grapple. "My apologies, zhànshì," he hissed, "but I have a greater fish on the hook than you." He shrugged and fired a shot over her shoulder, a glowing white beam that missed Jill entirely but instead struck the still-insensate, bloody form of the Beast! The big man vaulted to his feet almost immediately, wounded but back in the fight, taking in the scene with a practiced eye before he moved like lightning, bounding away from Jill and her dangerous hands without a word. For his part, the Withering ran too - summoning his small white dragon and leaping aboard to kip up some hundred feet in the air. "Perhaps next time - if you survive the new world!"

 

Instead he landed next to Willow and the Fire, where he sketched a bow in the instant it took him to scoop up Fire and leap away up onto the strip mall rooftop nearby. "Désolé , mesdames , mais parlées pour!"

 

While all this had been happening, Mastermind had been concentrating across the street. "Enough! I have not waited a century and a half to be defeated by the likes of you!" Across the street, the Tugboat Crab Shack, an al fresco seafood cafe built into an actual converted tugboat that had been taken apart and rebuilt on the site after the 1993 Terminus Invasion, raised itself up into the air as he gestured. "Atavisms!" Mastermind called. "Destroy the Interceptors - and then their machine. History will be ours!" And with that, he hurled the entire building at one side of the street, piling Miss Americana and Willow into the parking lot asphalt with bone-crushing force as a hundred tons of weight came crashing down on them! 

[Gizmo]

Regaining her balance with a snarl, Jill let some of the deathly energies encircling her hands bleed off into the air with considerable effort as the Withering escaped aboard his mount. "I'm not done with you!" she snapped angrily even as Mastermind suddenly gave them an entirely new problem to worry about. Shielding her face with one arms from the shrapnel of debris sent hurling in every direction from the impact she forced herself to remember that both Willow and Miss Americana were many times over more durable than the average human being, that she hadn't just witness more of her team and family murdered before her eyes. She bit out a series of incomprehensible expletives that jumped between languages as she tried to reorder her thoughts, ultimately focusing on the armored woman next to her.

 

The virulent green light finally faded from her fingers to be replaced with a warm, sun-dappled blue as she got an arm under one of Dragonfly's shoulders to help support her, mindful of the injured ribs she was obviously compensating for with her stance. At her touch bone and muscle began to knit back together, healing the the engineer even if her suit and equipment remained dented and damaged. "Dios, I want them dead so much but we have to start fighting smart. He wants the machine destroyed; if I hold them off can you finish what you were doing with it?" Her arms tightened around Mara protectively even as her eye darted between their attackers and the wreckage, looking for any sign of the women crushed beneath it.

[April]

Willow had a moment to reflect under the rubble of the building.  Her armor was cracked and burned, stressed and scorched, but it still had some life in it.  She could feel blood running down her cheek, some debris must have slashed her face, but she knew that wound would close.  She also knew she wasn't fighting smart, that all she had been trying to do these last few moments is just inflict as much pain and suffering onto those that took Talya and Erik from her.  She wasn't working with her friends, allies and teammates, and it was time she started.

 

The boat-building shuddered and the sound of metal being rent filled the air when huge vines and roots burst forth from the rubble and swept it aside before withdrawing to cover the woman standing at the center of it and (perhaps accidentally) uncovering Miss Americana.  Min wiped the blood from her cheek, giving it only a casual glance, while the burnt and broken parts of her armor were ripped off and discarded by the new growth.

 

She looked at Mara and Ellie.  "You two OK?"

[Fox]

Dragonfly took a deep breath as she healed, visibly straightening as her ribs healed up - though she had to reach up and pop some of the armor there out a bit to give the breath a little more room. She was not looking forward to armor repairs, but there were higher priorities. And higher-priority targets, on both sides.

 

"We'll be okay," she confirmed, giving Jill a quick squeeze before indicating that she could stand comfortably on her own again. "...can get the machine going if you can keep them off me and the machine," she added, frowning up at the villains as she made a quick assessment. "Don't...bother trying to heal Americana, but get her on her feet and away from portal if I go down. Going to do a little interference on my way over, then I need to focus on what I'm doing; supposed to be a two-scientist job. ....good luck."

 

"Hey idiot!" she shouted, making a flight-assisted dash toward her creation, already reaching out to it with her mind to assess its status. "Cheese!"

Most of the drones went with their mistress, but one of them, unattended, had shot up behind Mastermind; at her word it circled around to hover inches in front of his face. It issued an annoyingly cheery trill before the lens that covered its forward face lit up in a dizzying, nauseating pattern of randomly-strobing too-bright neon.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Argh!" 

 

With yet another attack on their master, the Atavisms focused all their unholy fury on Dragonfly. A blast of flaming stones as large as her fist shot by her head, a searing bolt of cosmic energy just missed setting her lower back on fire right through her battered armor, but even as they tore divots in the ground and blasted craters in the strip mall's closed stores, Dragonfly continued her work! Mastermind himself targeted her, hurling a bolt of raw telekinetic power that hit the liquor store where the Interceptors had been working seemingly a lifetime ago, setting it ablaze. But nobody hit Dragonfly! 

 

At least until the Beast bounded in, the concrete breaking beneath his feet as he landed only a foot or two away from Mara! He drew back his fist and hurled a mighty punch, one that would surely have taken off Mara's head if Willow hadn't gotten in the way! The mighty blow hit the dryad in the stomach, doubling her over and sending her flying backwards to smash against a lightpole, half out-of-breath. With his punch landed, the Beast winked at Mara, his teeth gleaming beneath his bloody mustache, before he vaulted back up onto the nearby rooftop.

[Electra]

Miss A lay still in the rubble for a few moments, breathing, blinking, but otherwise not doing much of anything. Finally, though, she sat up, wiping the underside of her nose with the side of her hand, as though swiping at blood that wasn't there. "All right, that is more than enough," she muttered, taking to the air once more to face down Mastermind. "I don't even know what you're doing here or what you want, but you kidnapped my boyfriend and killed his teammate and dropped a goddamn building on my head, and I am just... so incredibly done with you!" She snapped her wrist at the enemy leader, releasing a laser spray even bigger and brighter than the ones before it. The blasts careened straight into Mastermind, lighting up the sky like, appropriately enough, the fourth of July. "Did anybody else get buried?" she asked, looking down towards the wreckage.

[Gizmo]

It wasn't until Miss Americana's blaze of laser fire faded that the next brightest light source on the battlefield drew the attention of the varied combatants. The blue light around Jill's fists had grown in intensity until it was impossible to make out more than the vague silhouette of the woman behind it. With a shout like she was lifting some great weight she pushed the rippling field of bioelectricity outward in a rush of power that tossed back debris and rubble as it went. Before Mastermind had even finished reeling a glowing translucent dome had solidified over the remaining Interceptors and the machinery attached to the rift in time, a thick barrier against any attack. "Take your best shot," the masked woman growled upward at the Atavisms before calling over to Americana, "Make sure Willow's alright then help 'Fly figure that thing out. I can do this all damn day."

[Fox]

"Stupid piece of hacked-together junk, what idiot made you...."

 

Mara stood over her capacitor array scowling, pulling junks of debris out of it - not the direct fault of any one person, but it hadn't been designed with combat in mind. The back of her head was already spinning with design improvements for next time, if there was a next time....

 

She'd frankly been expecting to take the hit from their enemy, and have the work finished by Miss Americana; when Willow took that blow, she spared a concerned glance before forcing her attention back to her work. She wasn't going to let that be in vain, nor the frankly attractive efforts of her girlfriend, but this stupid machine....

 

She growled, grabbing two of the rings and ignoring the arcs of residual electricity that arced up to her gauntlets to score the metal. "#### it, had better be worth it, going to punch Jack in the nose, shove my metal boot up the bad guy's...." she muttered, hauling on it with the strength her suit had left and sending it spinning. It responded immediately, gaining speed as it pulled power out of the anomaly and drove it toward the city grid.

[Avenger Assembled]

And the gateway spiraled open, gaping wide and so bright Gina had to shield her eyes inside her basement shelter as the radio wash overwhelmed her connection to the robot - 

 

And the Interceptors (and Echo) came racing outward, Caradoc in the rear and moving with a slow, deliberate pace that bespoke an inner injury - 

 

And Mastermind gave a great and terrible shout, calling on oaths so ancient that only Willow could understand his wrath - 

 

And Geckoman, last through the portal, exited while riding on the back of a Tyrannosaurus Rex covered in iron plating, the great beast roaring its defiance to the West End night sky as it stomped out to join the ersatz army arranged against the Atavisms, the wash of radio waves fading as the portal itself collapsed behind them.

 

Hovering in the sky, albeit increasingly battered and bruised, Mastermind pointed to heroes lost and found and declared, "So be it, then! Let all the horrors this world has known in a century and a half of carnage be on your miserable heads. We are ENEMIES today!" And with that, Mastermind and the three remaining Atavisms burst upwards in a flash of light, vanishing into the night over the strip mall as if they had never been. 
 

Well, if you didn't count the carnage - the torn-up street, the buildings hurled into the ground, the smoldering and living plants scattered through the decidedly worse-for-wear parking lot, the battered heroes as they picked themselves up off the street, the unconscious form of the fallen Darkness, who still lived despite taking a direct hit from the tugboat restaurant that had hit Willow and Miss Americana - but what could heal the horror of what they had all lost today? 

 

When Bombshell opened her eyes, she found herself staring at the face of Satan himself! Satan was dressed as an old-timey sea captain and declaring in a speech bubble, "Try me Devil Wings! They're hotter than the Inferno, landlubbers!" The air smelled distinctly of fried foods and blood, she was pinned inside a large box, and everything hurt. 

[Electra]

Miss Americana managed to hover in the sky for a few moments after being abruptly sent into autopilot mode, blinking and grinning vacuously as she recorded the events happening around her. The damage she'd sustained in the fight, however, had not done her internal gyroscopes any favors. Without a conscious mind able to compensate for the imbalance, she began to teeter in the air. The effect was subtle at first, a gentle rocking motion, then more extreme, ratcheting back and forth at the knees like the arm of a freakish metronome. Four, five, six swings, and she didn't recover from the seventh forward swing, instead following her own momentum downward to faceplant into the rubble-strewn ground. 

 

Beneath her home in Hanover, Gina said several very bad words and swiped a hand beneath her still-bloody nose. The area was entirely blanketed with radio static, and there was no telling when she was going to be able to reconnect. She switched to satellite view, but those were muddy too, overwhitened from a rush of light, clouded with dust from the fight debris. For the moment, she was in the dark. 

[alderwitch]

Subtle twists and tugs gave way to yanking on them desperation. The knot was so damn tight. Sure, they taught her how to shoot a gun but why hadn't anyone thought to cover how to get oneself untied from a sacrificial alter in the SOE basics. Talya's skin began to chafe but even with blood on the ropes there just wasn't enough give. She didn't spare a look for the other three agents awaiting their doom with about as much aplomb. She didn't need to see the betrayal or satisfaction in anyone else's eyes. Especially if she could just get the damn ropes loose! When the dagger plunged through her heart, Talya expected the pain but she didn't expect it to burn. Or it to keep burning long after death should have released her.

 

The debris of the building hid the blood red glow of the dark magic that resurrected Talya, forming her body once more from handfuls of the ash and smoke trapped under the tugboat. Magic told her heart to beat in defiance of all natural order, and it burned. It always burned. But that, at least, was familiar. Her first breath was sharp, short and she tried to twist against the heavy weight pinning her to the ground to no avail. Squinting at the devil's cheerful face in confusion, Talya groped with the one hand that wasn't trapped to sketch out the confines of her narrow space. Was she buried again? Not the shape of a coffin. Her fingertips traced over the rough expanse of rock and rubble, ignoring the sting when her fingertips were scraped by the jagged ends of a beam. Debris. A door, maybe? 

 

Experience told her that the best thing to do was let the magic finish its work. The too-fast pounding of her heart was more than enough to tell Talya that she was just on the edge between 'life' and 'death' but she didn't know how the battle had gone - or how long it might have been. Her teammates could be hurt. Min could be hurt. 

 

Talya's fingernails bit into the wood, her fingers curving into a claw, leaving small furrows from her nails in the face of the devil staring at her smugly. First, she was going to get her other arm free, then she was going to claw her way out of her current grave. And if - if - the people she cared about were still in trouble, at least Talya would have a serious element of surprise.

 

 

[April]

While a part of her was elated to see Erik and the others the rest of her was still overwhelmingly angry and distraught.  Her white hair streamed behind her as she strode purposefully toward the supine Darkness, the dryad's cuts and bruises healing and fading.  As she grew closer the vines lashed around the wrists and neck of the fallen Atavism and lifted her up and stretched her arms wide.

 

Min stood there for a moment contemplating the woman that killed Talya, tendrils wrapping around her own arm and forming into a large spike.  She hesitated for only a moment, but then her expression hardened and she lifted her arm to strike... only to stop and snap her head around in the direction of the debris.  Darkness momentarily forgotten, Min launched herself in the direction of the scratching she heard and started to toss aside chunks of debris.

[R. Bluefish]

Echo whipped her head around, heart pounding wildly in her chest, trying to take in all of her surroundings at once. "What in the hell just happened?" Let's see, there was the dinobot charge, the exploding mountain, the time vortex...Time vortex? But that was what it had been, she realized. Her timey senses were still tingling. Which must mean...she forced herself to calm down and take in her new environment. Even then it took her a moment to recognize where she was - the Freedom City she knew had far less rubble and wanton destruction. On its good days, at least. "We're...back home?" In a movement that was slightly clumsier than was typical for her, she dropped down from the dinobot's back, landing on her hands and knees on the battle-blasted city street. She got to her feet and looked around at the scene of carnage, the smoldering plantlife, the restaurant that she was pretty sure used to be over there, the white-haired woman - hey, she stole my look - frantically digging through the rubble. "Uh, yay?"

 

Normally she would have made a joke. Or tried to see what she could do to help. Or at the very least, being suddenly surrounded by so many A-list heroes would have made her start fangirling out and trying to collect as many autographs as she could at super-speed. But seeing the devastated battlefield had drained her of her usual exuberant energy, and the recent fight combined with the unexpected time travel had left her feeling worn-out and disoriented. Unsteadily, she sat down on what was left of the curb, drawing her knees up to her chin. "I'm fine," she mumbled to no one in particular, her expression hidden by her blue-and-silver mask. "Just gimme a second..."

[Gizmo]

In the rush of sensation bombarding both his usual senses and his energy-sensitive awareness as they came out the other side of the rift it was easy for Erik to let his mind click into the rapid prioritization of a duel, filtering through with barely a conscious thought. Steve was upright, more or less; whatever it would have taken to put the big man down for good they weren't going to find out that day. Chris had managed to bring the cloned dinosaur along with him; they could worry about that later. One item checked off the list and another dropped to the bottom. Echo keeping it together, barely, but he thought he recognized Miss Americana toppling over nearby. He felt his sister's forcefield drop without having to look and recognized Min's handiwork in the plants amidst the rubble. He hadn't seen her cut loose like that in the city since the Gorgon's attack-- and immediately the calm observation was washed away in a racing pulse and pumping limbs as he ran to the edge of the pile of rubble where the dryad was desperately tossing chunks of road and building out of the way. "What happened?!"

 

"They..." his sister's voice began from behind him, trailing off as she swallowed thickly. Ellie had pushed herself to her limits battling against the Withering's power and the past them to maintain a barrier big enough to protect the rift and machinery from the Atavisms but that wasn't why she felt impossibly tired. "Listen, hermano, you need to, you need to sit down or--"

 

"Where's Talya?!" the fencer demanded, the grinning daredevil who'd suggested a dinosaur stampede and the icy warrior promising retribution for an attack on his friend both gone as he looked about with mounting panic. "What happened?!"

[Avenger Assembled]

Caradoc quietly limped over to Miss Americana's side, doing his best to mask the pain of an injury to his left leg that he was almost certain reflected an interior augmented muscle whose metal strands had been pulled free and embedded in what passed for his regular flesh. It was only pain - pain that his body's natural regenerative powers would gradually heal over time as the smart metal of his frame returned to its original shape. What was his own pain?

 

He carefully knelt in front of Miss Americana and gently turned her over to face the sky, aware that there was no human spine within the robot to sever. He patiently waited by her side for her recovery, watching the scene they had left behind with an impassive metal face despite his growing horror at the implications of the scene they saw before them. What had happened here, while he had been trapped in the past and away from those who he had sworn to fight alongside?

[Ecalsneerg]

Geckoman pulled the robot reins on his dinosaur as they emerged into the present day, Roary disorientated, confused, and likely to get very pissed off at the world around him. "It's OK, big guy, it's OK," he whispered soothingly, not feeling it himself as he looked at the carnage around them. The hell had gone on here? He slowly, as carefully as he could, steered the big dino along the street towards the rubble Min was tossing through. Who was under there? Was it Bombshell? What had happened?

 

He rummaged in his belt, pulling out a battered old remote. The Pitchoo was online. They were definitely back in the right timeline. Which meant whatever had happened had definitely happened to his versions of his friends. He felt a lump in the back of his throat. He coaxed at the dinosaur, trying to figure out how to convince it to start lifting rubble out with its mouth. The dinosaur began biting up large chunks of rubble, and lightly tossing them off to the side as Chris made his new steed slowly, carefully dig through the wreckage.

[alderwitch]

Inside the small cocoon of debris, Talya's progress had been laboriously slow in her attempts to shift herself loose from where the rubble had pinned her in place. Faintly, she could hear the muffled activity from up above, enough to know that there was movement and conversation but not enough to pick out what was going on or who happened to be shifting the rubble. Hopefully it was an ally but regardless, she wasn't going to do anyone any good where she was. 

 

As the weight on her chest and shoulder finally eased, Talya sucked in a wheezing breath and twisted to take advantage of the brief freedom and free her other arm. It was a pair of hands that thrust through the small opening made by the efforts of Willow and Geckoman's new dinosaur assistant, fingertips scraped and bloody from her efforts. The rest of a very alive - and very naked - Talya followed suit in short order to land on her knees on the ground. The bruises and scrapes gained from her efforts escaping the debris were already fading but the lambent glow of the necromantic magic that had resurrected the ex-thief still pulsed under her skin, turning the only scar that Talya had a brilliant red with every too-fast beat of her heart.  

 

 

[Electra]

Miss Americana lay insensible for several minutes, her eyes closed and her face slack, though surprisingly not much worse for wear after her encounter with the rubble-strewn pavement. She wasn't in her normal heroing clothes, Steve could see, but had instead obviously come from lab work, still wearing her lab coat and with her hair thrown back in a now very messy ponytail. Eventually she stirred and then opened her eyes, blinking and looking around for a moment before she settled on his face. "Steve," she began, reaching up a hand to grab hold of his arm. "You complete dumbass. I told you this would happen if you worked with those guys." Her tone held no heat at all, and the corners of her mouth quirked upward. "Are you okay?" 

[Avenger Assembled]

"You are concerned that this might happen whenever I leave the house," Steve told her with a quiet warmth, their conversation too quiet for anyone to overhear. "I will be fine," he told her, which was true enough. He peered over at the wrecked restaurant for a moment, trying to suss out the scene there and figure out if he was needed. "They have dug Bombshell out from under the restaurant and she appears to be largely unhurt, but the impact appears to have removed her clothing." He thought for a moment, then realized he had no idea how that could have happened. "What happened here tonight?" he asked her as the shadow of Geckoman's Tyrannosaurus Rex passed over them. "You came for me, as I knew you would - but what else?"

[April]

Min didn't stop to answer when Erik asked his questions.  A part of her fully aware that if she stopped to answer she'd be unable to start again and would very likely do something that would forever ruin her reputation in the eyes of her husband and his friends.  So she lost herself in the rubble, hurling chunks aside as if they were made of cardboard, and shut her mind off.

 

She hesitated when she saw the hand only to redouble her efforts turning the remaining plant life in the area to the task of shoving aside rubble when at last she saw Talya.  For Min the world went sideways as she experienced emotional whiplash, a sob wracking her frame that managed to articulate the grief then relief better than words ever could.

 

The dryad couldn't speak, she tried again and again but no words came.  Instead she just wrapped her arms around Talya while the tears ran down her cheeks.