ic Time Out

[Electra]

Raina winced as she took in the scene on the viewscreen, looking indecisively between the corner where she'd hidden the children and the beatdown taking place outside. That other girl was in real obvious trouble, but if Raina started shooting fireballs, she'd not only drain her own magic, but she'd let them know there was somebody up here and ruin the element of surprise. "Get those defenses working, now!" she told Merlin tersely, who nodded and raced over to VINCE's nearest access panel. "All right kiddos, quick change of plan. Your folks will be here soon, but I'm gonna see if I can take care of one of these bad guys before they even get here. Sit tight." 

 

She took a deep breath and refocused her magic, so that all three of them shimmered back into view. Quickly she pulled out her compact, disguised herself as an incredibly burly man wearing a face mask, then shoved the window open. Flicking her lighter, she gathered her ball of flame, grew it into a large, crackling ball, and sent it hurtling towards the closer of the attackers. She managed to resist a whoop of delight when it hit its mark, but only just barely. The guy looked hurt, but he didn't go down. "Come on, Merlin," she murmured. 

[Gizmo]

Wildcard toppled forward as the fireball hit, sent sprawling by him own surprise more than the mass of the flaming projectile. Echo sense a spike of the unsettling twisting sensation that had surrounded the jester themed villain for the entire fight but this time it came too late to be effective, leaving the back of his costume scorched and one of his cap's three tails lit up like a candle wick.

 

"There is somebody up there!" Downtime growled, sounding more annoyed by the interruption than overly concerned with his partner's wellbeing. Putting a hand to his belt he winked out of view once again, only the violently flung front door to the school indicating where he'd gone. In the apartments upstairs Raina heard the doors at either end of the stairwell slam against walls in much quicker succession than should have been possible followed by jackhammer pounding on the front door. Despite her quivering lower lip Eden busied herself making reassuring noises for her littler sister's benefit but even the three year old could tell that they only had moments before the door was knocked off of its hinges by the temporally accelerated assault.

[R. Bluefish]

Echo thrust out a hand impotently towards the direction Downtime had vanished in. "Get back here! I never let people do their things! It's just not my thing!" she shouted after him, with a bravado she no longer felt. Keen tactical analysis had never been her strong suit, but it was obvious even to her that she was losing. More than that, she was losing badly. She suspected that the only reason she was still standing was that she was too dumb to realize how badly hurt she was, which probably meant that the moment the fight was over - for better or for worse - she would fall apart like a quart of beef stew in a punctured plastic bag. Her only real hope at this point was to make sure the other guys looked worse by then. A moment ago that seemed unlikely, but the sudden fireball from the building had caused her to revisit the odds, in a definitively positive way. Would that be the babysitter? The babysitter has fireballs? What am I saying, of course the babysitter has fireballs.

 

Seized by renewed vigor, she threw herself forward, sprinting towards Wildcard while at the same time forcing herself to ignore the way her head was swimming. Concussions are for the weak. "Hey! Jester Boy!" She curled one hand into a fist as she ran. "Your hat's on fire! Here, let me put it out for you!" She swung at his face, intending to finally knock that stupid had right off his head, or possibly his head off his body, whichever proved easiest. The moment of impact she had been anticipating never came - Wildcard ducked her swing, causing her to stagger with the momentum, and she instead smashed a fist-sized hole in the wall next to him. "Stop moving!"

[Electra]

Raina paled at the sudden pounding on the apartment door, but her voice was a cheerful whisper as she talked to the kids. "Great, now he'll walk right into our trap!" she told them with great false confidence. Raina was a master of false confidence. She shoved the window wider, every bit as wide as it would go. "You stay low, Merlin, don't let him see you. You gonna get it done?" Merlin, very distracted already, gave her a quick thumbs up and burrowed deeper into the innards of the machine he was repairing, till even Raina could barely see him. Grabbing hold of her broom, she mounted it and skidded it across the floor to the kids. "Time for us to skedaddle."

 

She scooped Mia into one arm and helped Eden climb on the broom, the bubble of flight magic helping to hold them all steady. "Think of Christmas, think of snow, think of sleigh bells, off we go like reindeer in the sky!" she sang softly as they began moving, first sliding through the window, then arcing up into the evening sky. 

[Gizmo]

Wildcard's flechette gun clattered against the ground as he scrambled out of the way of Echo's blow, his probability control powers wearing thin from the two pronged assault. From the way his manic grin twisted into a scowl he knew it, too. "Rrraugh! That's cheating!" he cursed at the heroine, making a clumsy lunge toward her. "Cheater!"

 

In the apartment upstairs the door was thrown from its hinges, the wood splinted from the impossibly fast flurry of blows delivered in the held breath between seconds. Unattended bills on the kitchen table went whipping into the air as the temporally accelerated Downtime burst through one room after another, quickly covering the whole of the apartment and finding it empty. "What the hell?!" he demanded, winking back into the normal time reference in the living room to kick irritably as a discarded stuffed animal on the carpet. "Whoever you are, you're only making this harder on yourself! Quit hiding!"

 

On the street Echo deftly side-stepped Wildcard's attack even in her injured state but reality twisted again, her precognitive danger sense sounding like a klaxon in her head as the demented jester moved faster than should have been possible. Before she could dodge again he had her in a solid headlock, sneering downward. "Ha! Guess who gets to be my hostage, @#$%! Unless your buddy with the fireballs wants to see what happens when somebody's luck really runs out!" Even as she struggled, however, Buffy couldn't help but notice that the laws of physics had suddenly gone quiet around Wildcard.

[Gizmo]

"Who's hiding?" a caramel smooth voice called from Downtime's right. He whirled about but there was no one there, just a television set left on to some infomercial with a weirdly grinning salesman in a ridiculous lime green suit. "Macaulay Culkin, eat your heart out."

 

The Crime Leaguer didn't have a chance to respond before the stubby turret that had silently unfolded from the seemingly mundane fire alarm over his head discharged a three coil-like spatial warps in violent electric blue. The computer targeted attack - with a little help from a certain capuchin - crashed like weighted bolas into Downtime's shoulders, waist and ankles, knocking him face down into to floor with a loud crack. The villain was instantly knocked senseless, bound without ever having seen what hit him.

 

"Well!" Vince observed, blowing away smoke rising from his extended index finger. "I'll be a monkey's uncle!"

[R. Bluefish]

Echo struggled against Wildcard's grip, furious. "If you're going to take me hostage, would it kill you to put on some deodorant first? You can go back to shooting me with the card gun, just stop making me smell you!"

 

Abruptly, she went still, as she registered the lack of screwy physics activity around them. She felt a grin split her face in two. "What's the matter? No more aces in your sleeve?" With a burst of renewed vigor, she gathered her will, focusing on enhancing the power of her muscles relative to the world around her. "Looks like you're out of luck, Jester Boy," she said, twisting in his arms, using her sudden strength to easily bend his arms aside and slip free. "The only one who's going to be messing with the laws of physics now is me!" She brought her leg up as she whirled to face him, aiming a high, sweeping kick at his face that missed connecting by what felt to the frustrated heroine like a fraction of an inch. "Feel like going at it for real now, no more loading the dice?" she taunted.

[Electra]

Raina held her breath as Downtime rampaged through the house, till a heavy thud and a triumphant monkey screech told her that the house's defenses were well and truly online again. She released her breath with a woosh and smiled at the girls as she flew to roof level. "Okay, it sounds like-" Her words were cut off as she saw the predicament her downstairs defender was in on the ground. "Ah, crap..." She didn't get much of a chance to finish that thought either, before the girl broke away from the villain and slipped free. "Okay, not quite done yet, but we'll get there." Her aim was very shaky as she tried to keep both girls perfectly  steady on the broom, but hopefully the fireball she popped off would give Wildcard something to think about. 

[Gizmo]

"Cheating! You're cheating!" Wildcard shouted as he scrambled out of Raina's line of fire. The gout of mystic flame crashed into the street instead, sending sparks raining outward in a brilliant flash that cast the villain's darting eyes in stark light. Even with his probability warping powers spent for the time being he had far more actual combat experience than both of the heroes put together and an acrobatic feint to one side was enough to open Echo up for a quick rabbit punch that struck her squarely. Without the benefit of scoring a lucky hit to exactly the right spot, however, he was ultimately just a man and the young woman who'd stood up to so much punishment already that evening weathered the blow without flinching. 

[R. Bluefish]

"Oh, look who's talking." Wildcard's blow was enough to make Echo grunt, but after being on the receiving end of Downtime's massive haymakers, she hardly felt it. Seeing an opening, she darted to the side. "Everybody cheats in fights, Hat Boy." She sprang into the air and planted her feet on the wall, as if she were going to escape up towards the rooftops, but instead coiled her legs under her and pushed off, backflipping off the bricks and bringing her elbow around to smash into the top of Wildcard's head. He collapsed like a puppet with cut strings.

 

Landing in a crouch, she stared at his unmoving form long enough to be sure he wasn't getting back up, then sagged as the adrenaline left her system. "Some of us are just better at it than others," she finished wearily. Then, "I got that move from WWE."

 

She looked up at the girls on the flying broomstick - huh, a flying broomstick - and called up, leaning against the wall with one hand and holding her ribs with the other. "Hey. Thanks for the artillery. Are the kids all right?" Because I'm not. I bruised my favorite spleen.

[Electra]

Raina carefully spiralled lower, steering the broom with her knees while keeping both arms wrapped around her charges. "Yeah, we're fine," she assured Echo as she came to a halt with her toes just brushing the pavement. "We got out before the fast guy broke into the apartment. But you look like s- like garbage," she amended. "I guess you're the reason they didn't get upstairs before I even noticed anything was wrong." She glanced towards the building. "You wanna come back inside and clean up? The adults should be back any minute here. I'm Raina, by the way." 

[R. Bluefish]

"Buffy," said Buffy, wiping a trickle of blood from her mouth, then looking at the red smear on her hand. "I'm Buffy. Cleaning up," she winced as she touched the gashes that Wildcard's flechettes had left on her flank, "sounds pretty good right now. How much morphine do you have? I'll take all of it." Also, I am an adult, damn it. Curse my girlish good looks.

 

"They were Crime League," she said, indicating the unconscious Wildcard as she limped back towards the gym entrance. "They were here for Jack of all Blades, because apparently that was what struck them as a good idea. They're lucky that it was us here, and not him." Her ribs twinged again. Ow. Definitely going to be coughing up some vertebrae tonight. "I mean, I wasn't very lucky in that regard, but they were."