Tuesday, September 28

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[Costume - Rescue Girl Lucky Star]

[HP 11/11]

[Styles and Skills]

►Archetype Skill - Transformation Sequence

►Archetype Skill - Combat Inhibitor

►Archetype Skill - Rescue Re-Arm

►Badass

►Cunning

► Card Curio 1

► Audition Notes 2

►Drama

► Noncombatant Teleport 1

►Flamboyance

►Signature Skill - Adaptive Armoire 3

►Stored Costumes: (Understudy)

► Hog the Limelight 1

►Grit

► Jinx-Bearer 0

“Well?” Bianca asked from outside of the bathroom door. “What do you think?”

“It’s nothing like I’d imagined,” I replied, “but it’s also exactly what I needed.”

It really was. I’d been looking for a build that would support…well, support…for a while, and Pataki had really come through with the hybrid Tele-Portal/Sara-N-Dipity Costume. It didn’t have many new powers, but they both felt impactful.

[New Skill: Noncombatant Teleport! Instantly move an Extra or unconscious to a random location within 300 yards that’s out of danger]

[New Skill: Jinx-Bearer! Some unfortunate souls bear the brunt of the world’s bad luck. Take an ongoing status effect from an Extra or super and bear it yourself]

[Jinx-Bearer] seemed highly flexible, though it shoehorned me into pure support. If I’d had it for Theseus, I could have ‘taken’ the movement debuff from Fursona, letting her fly and keeping the pressure on the supervillain instead of allowing him to reach Broadway Mall. That might’ve been the difference between victory and defeat in ‘The Dark Hand of Capitalism.’

The second, [Noncombatant Teleport], felt like a limited version of Tele-Portal’s main power. I couldn’t use it to throw Fursona around the battlefield like Tele-Portal had in the ‘Winter is Coming’ Episode, but I could use it to save Extras. It had some really powerful synergies with the third Archetype Skill, [Rescue Re-Arm]. Even better, when I’d rolled my Drama skill, the upgrade had landed right on it!

Oh yeah, this build had three Archetype Skills, which I’d never seen before. The first was my usual [Transformation Sequence]. Nothing new there; I could switch Costumes in-Episode, blah blah blah. And the second one, frankly, kind of sucked. [Combat Inhibitor] restricted my powers. I couldn’t take anything designed to do damage. It wasn’t pacifism; I could still punch and kick. I just couldn’t carry [Starlance] or [Spotlight Strike] or anything like that. But, given the build’s purpose, the restriction made sense.

Especially because of the third Archetype Skill.

[Rescue Re-Arm] reset one random power’s per-Act uses on the Rescue Girl Lucky Star Costume whenever I used a power to save someone, whether from superpowered combat, an environmental hazard, or even clearing a nasty status effect. It only targeted powers that weren’t at max per-Act uses, too, so with [Noncombatant Teleport], for instance, I could quickly move a whole group of Extras to relative safety, thanks to the reset.

I sat on the toilet lid, fiddling with the remaining powers, and eventually settled on [Hog the Limelight]—for the power reset potential—and both [Card Curio] and [Audition Notes]. I hadn’t ever used [Card Curio], and [Audition Notes] felt tailor-made for an Extra-focused Costume like this one. [Audition Notes] had upgraded after the ‘Appetite for Destructo’ Episode resolved, as had [Hog the Limelight], which now drew fire for longer.

[Card Curio 1: Free-associate more information from your surroundings and a card reading]

[Audition Notes 2: Every Extra brings something to the table. Check their notes to find out what. More detailed information, including name and age, are provided]

Honestly, I hoped [Card Curio] played like [Check the Script], but maybe with a little more luck to it. I’d had the power for a year, and it was time to find out what it did.

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I made one other adjustment—this one to my Understudy build. [Hog the Limelight] could go; it had synergies with [Quick-Time Change] and [I-Frame Transform], but I wanted to pack more of a punch on my main build. [Spotlight Strike] came back, giving me an up-front damage option. I kept my other support-oriented powers on Rainy Day since they did unique things I couldn’t replicate with Lucky Star. Then, finally, I replaced Lab Assistant Panic with Rescue Girl Lucky Star.

Satisfied with my Costume’s build, I opened the door and posed.

“Cool!” Bianca squealed.

I nodded. I was pretty cool, and so was my Costume. It had traded out the overwhelming pastel pink and blue for a dark navy, red, and white color scheme, though the white color dominated the dress—even the tennis skirt with shorts underneath it. Stilts similar to Tele-Portal’s gave me three inches of height, making me tower over Bianca and move shockingly quickly, while a stylish red sport coat hugged my chest. A white circle with a blue clover inside it had been embroidered on the right breast pocket, while the left bore a blue swirl reminiscent of Tele-Portal’s portals with a red cross superimposed over it. Blinking LED strips ran up my legs and down my arms.

It felt exactly like a hybrid of the two support heroes’ outfits should, and I grinned at Bianca. “Bet this build can keep up with you going full speed.”

“Maybe. What does it do?”

I explained my new powers and couldn’t help but see her grin. My own fell just a little. “Yes, it means you’re going to be shot-calling more when I’m Lucky Star, but—“

“Annie, we’re partners. I’m not trying to steal your show or take over. If it makes the most sense for me to call the shots, then I’ll call the shots. But when it doesn’t, we run off your plan. Okay?”

“Okay.” I nodded slowly. “I think the right play right now is to do a post-mortem on ‘Dark Hand.’”

Bianca sighed. “Really? I mean, I agree with you, and it’s part of the plan, but I really don’t want to.”

----------------------------------------

We sat in front of the TV and turned it on. After the ‘Gourmet’s Glutton Hour’ episode, one thing we’d agreed on was that any losses needed an after-action report, as well as any time we weren’t satisfied with how our plans had gone. As our first loss, ‘Dark Hand’ definitely counted. So, for the next half hour, we watched the parts of the Episode we’d been in. And by the end, we’d come up with a lot of room for improvement, including three steps we could take the next time Theseus lined up against us.

The first one involved Theseus directly—or specifically, his weapons. He’d rotated out arms pretty much freely; the only time we’d really disrupted them was after he’d switched them out. Theseus himself was a tough target, but the Alkirk drones bringing arms in and out of the fight? We could destroy those pretty quickly, even with their chaffe, and deny the supervillain the very thing that made him hard to fight.

The second was pressure. Against some villains, backing off might be the right call, but with Theseus, we had to push, push, push—especially once we’d damaged one of his limbs. We couldn’t let him regroup, or he’d come at us with something new and exciting—and with Theseus, that’d be handing him the win. I couldn’t help but laugh when Bianca made that joke for the twentieth time.

Our final step was more of a PR error on our part, but I hoped it wouldn’t come back to bite us. When we’d ran from the food court with the Extras, Theseus had taken the APPEAL member. We’d known he was a TU APPEAL member, and we’d known the organization saw Theseus in a better light than me. That’d been a chance to switch their thoughts up, and we’d blown it. In the future, we needed to win the public relations battles we could.

“Okay, that’s not bad learning,” I said. “I’ll be honest, though. I don’t think we could have done a single thing to win that Episode. The ‘Appetite for Destructo’ Episode landing on top of us, and then Golden Goose, gave Theseus too much of a head start, and even though he waited until Act Three started, we couldn’t have gotten to him if we’d tried.”

“Agreed,” Bianca nodded. She had the whiteboard going. “But we might need to throw more minor league Episodes, so we need to come up with a plan to disengage gracefully, or to make it harder to straight-up lose them. If we can play for a draw, that’d be huge.”

She wrote ‘Power Wars Overlaps’ on the whiteboard. “Ideas for mitigating losses?”

I paused. Losses stung me, but they positively destroyed Bianca. “Okay, if we can get enough of an early lead, I can switch to a support/survival role to ride out the Power Wars episode, and you can focus on trying to thwart the minor leaguer’s goals and forcing them to retreat instead of playing for a win. It’d be a lot like that first Episode against Jumper. Aim for a tie?”

“Could work.” Bianca wrote it, then wrote ‘Call for Backup.’ “We know the Triad’s out there, and they’ll pile in on a major-league sighting, especially if an auxiliary like us calls it in. Maybe we can use them to take the high-powered heat so we can focus on getting our mission done. After all, even if Tele-Portal doesn’t consider minor league Episodes worth jumping in on, we’re positioned to win some of those. It’d stop future threats or make them less powerful.”

“Yeah. If we’d been able to disengage and go after Theseus, he wouldn’t have…” Wouldn’t have what? I thought. The truth was that I didn’t know what Theseus even wanted. “Let’s watch the other half of ‘Dark Hand,’ just to see what he might’ve stolen for Alkirk.”

“Agreed.”

I turned the TV back on.

Theseus sat at the base of a skyscraper in Mid-Town, watching the building. His seven remaining spider legs skittered below him, punching tiny pock-marks into the cement, and he’d replaced the hook with another rocket launcher and the sword arm with one that looked more like an electric whip. He shook his head. “Late. Can’t rely on old partners,” he muttered, but the camera drone picked it up.

We’d gotten unedited footage from Rocko, not the cleaned-up, for-Earth-consumption stuff the studios actually ran on TV, so that kind of thing slipped through.

The supervillain started climbing, his head swiveling as he scanned the air—he had to be looking for us. Then, almost thirty floors up, he smashed a window open. The camera drone zipped inside, flipping around to show the villain’s face. His chin was set, but a tiny smirk drifted through. He fired a trio of rockets at a steel-reinforced door, blowing it off its hinges, then used the whip to shock a pair of security guards who made the mistake of rushing him with pistols drawn.

Then he smashed a glass box open, grabbed something from inside, and headed back the way he’d entered. And just like that, the Episode was over.

“What do you think that was?” I asked.

Fursona rolled her eyes and grabbed my computer. She typed in ‘Tokyexico Daily Report,’ waited for the newspaper’s page to load, and then searched ‘Theseus’ as a keyword. Then, she clicked on the most recent link.

Supervillain Raids LeClerk Foundation Building

The minor-league supervillain Theseus took advantage of Power War Three fighting to shake his heroes, attack a robotics foundation’s research facility, and make off with experimental laser technology, officials said on Saturday.

According to Doctor Ferdinand DuBois, the device Theseus stole was “proprietary micromolecular-level technology” being developed to “solve major issues with metal-based construction and demolition, as well as pave the way to near-Ilneat levels of space travel through active particle defense.” While the loss of the laser itself is a minor setback, the recent alliance between Theseus and the Alkirk Corporation raises the specter of inter-corporation warfare, and the use of supervillains as proxies is also troubling.

“Well, shit,” Bianca said. “Next time we fight him, Theseus is gonna have a laser arm.”