Fursona and I didn’t say anything. We started running toward the mall as our [Dead Leg Protocol] debuffs ticked down. We arrived at the caved-in doors just as the first screaming Extras poured out, shattered glass clinking and crunching beneath their shoes.
[The Dark Hand of Capitalism: Act Two in Progress]
Extras pushed past us, shoving and battering us back and forth, but Fursona took the lead, and I followed the giant eagle through the crowd. “We need to stop him before he hurts someone!” I shouted.
“Yeah! Think he’s still following the Code of Conduct?” She replied.
“I don’t know!” I sure hoped he was, but he’d crashed into a busy mall without any thought toward the Extras’ safety. The crowd thinned out as we reached the food court where Tele-Portal and I had done our first patrol, revealing Theseus switching out his hook arm for something new. This arm looked less like a weapon and more like a buckler; as he held it up, a shimmering reddish shield extended from it, covering his side. The center of the metal buckler glowed a dull red.
“Theseus, stop! You’re putting Extras in danger!” I said, trying to appeal to his conscience.
“No, I’m not. I haven’t held a single one hostage, and I haven’t used a single power to keep them here or attack them. They’ve had every chance to leave,” he said calmly. “You can wag your finger at me for a lot of things, but breaking our Code’s not one of them.”
I glanced around. Sure enough, the food court was pretty much empty, except for a few Extras holding up phones and one wearing…fuck. An APPEAL shirt.
“Now, hold on, Theseu—“
The supervillain’s blade arm zoomed toward me, and I ducked under a table, which crumpled from the impact. Still, it hadn’t cut me, and I popped up, already firing a [Bit-Part Barrage] just as Fursona shouted, “Wait!”
It was too late, though. I couldn’t wait. The first beam caught Theseus dead in the chest—or it would have if not for the shield. As my [Stellar Rays] slammed home one after another, the central, glowing light grew brighter and brighter until it was almost white.
[Pause for Effect! +1 Drama Point]
Huh? That message usually only happened when I used [Thunderhead]. I’d never checked to see if my opponents got a warning when it was building, but—
BWEEEEW!
The shield exploded, the red transparent barrier fell apart, and the food court’s lights flickered. A moment later, a gigantic red beam cut across the room toward me, slicing through garbage cans and fake plants as it leveled the whole room at waist height. It sliced into me, burning through my superhero damage, and then stopped.
[HP 1/11]
I rolled, kicking a leg out to knock a half-melted chair away, and got to my feet. Theseus’s shield projection wasn’t up, and the buckler’s center blinked yellow. “Get him now!” I shouted as another drone—a camera one this time—zipped overhead, taking in the damage.
Fursona didn’t wait around. She screeched, pounding away at the shield arm with her sonic attack. Theseus’s legs clattered across the food court, closing the gap between her and him in seconds, but not before the shield arm’s plating shattered. He reeled back a sword blow, but I charged in, putting myself between the sword and my sidekick.
As the blow bore down on her, I activated [Hog the Limelight], and the sword’s angle changed suddenly, rushing toward me. “[Quick-Time Change],” I whispered, and a moment before the blow would have sliced into me and knocked me out of the fight, the world froze. I did the Itsy Bitsy Spider, let Theseus’s blade pass through me with [I-Frame Transform], and started charging up a [Thunderhead].
[Eye-Catcher! +1 Flamboyance Point]
[Flashy Fitting Room! +1 Flamboyance Point]
[Steel Yourself! +1 Grit Point]
[Pause for Effect! +1 Drama Point]
The room slowly filled with clouds as Theseus’s shield shifted from blinking yellow to pulsing orange. How long did I have? Enough time to get a [Ride the Lightning] off? The storm finished building just as his buckler turned red and the shield formed over him.
“We need to change tactics!” Fursona called. “How about Pitchfork?”
“Sure, that works!” I ran left, 6th-grade legs pumping for all they were worth, and Fursona flapped into the air and zoomed right—straight at the APPEAL member, who screamed and ducked behind a planter!
Theseus hesitated for a crucial moment, then turned toward me. The moment he did, Fursona shrieked again, buffeting him to the side and knocking his shield off-balance for just a split second.
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But that was enough.
[Ride the Lightning] fired, and I poured electricity into the gap in Theseus’s defenses, aiming as best I could for the shield arm’s shoulder. Circuits and wires sparked and popped, something exploded with a loud bang, and the red shield flickered off a moment later.
[Electric Lightshow! +1 Flamboyance Point]
[Thunderstruck! +1 Drama Point]
[Good Thinking! +1 Cunning Point]
Another Alkirk drone zoomed in, dropping a new arm for Theseus. He ejected the smoking, destroyed shield arm, but a new message popped up before he could equip it.
[A Powerful Hero is Joining the Fight]
[Name: Bud Lightbeam]
[Powerful Villains are Joining the Fight]
[Names: Lord Destructo, McHammer, Haze-Matt]
[Appetite for Destructo: Act One in Progress]
----------------------------------------
I gulped, trying to force down panic. The few Extras still in the food court didn’t know what was coming, and while Lord Destructo and McHammer had Codes of Conduct, Haze-Matt was a whole different animal.
Theseus clearly thought so, too. He’d stopped equipping his arm.
“Fursona, the mission’s changed. Think you can take Theseus?” I asked.
She stared at him for a moment. “He’s gotta be low, right? At the very least, I can stop him from winning,” she said.
“Great. I’m playing rescue and protection. Bud Lightbeam’s here. That means The Triad’s on its way. We just have to—“
Theseus interrupted. “I’m laying down my arms—one of them literally. I propose an immediate Neutral Field.”
“Agreed,” Fursona said before I could stop her. “What do you want?”
“I want the three of us to get out of here right now and resume our fight somewhere else. In return, I’ll tell you my target for the Episode so you can get there, and we’ll pick up right where we left off. The same powers, the same HP totals, and I won’t even equip a spare arm,” Theseus said. His face was pale, and he narrowed his eyes toward the upstairs, where a greenish fog had started rolling into the food court area.
I nodded slowly. “Agreed, on one condition. You help us get these dumbass Extras out of here first.”
Theseus held out his blade, and for a moment, I didn’t get it. Then I reached out, gingerly grabbed the tip, and shook it. Then I shifted back to Understudy.
“Hey, everyone, Magical Girl Understudy’s selling us out to the—“ The guy in the APPEAL shirt didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence. Theseus rushed him, tackling him and wrapping the flat of his bladed arm around him. Then he started skittering for the door, putting on speed as he went.
“That’s our cue!” I ran to one of the filmers, who backed up as I grabbed him, then summoned my sailboard with [Solar Wing]. The board materialized under him, and we rocketed toward the building’s exit, Fursona behind us with the other filmer protesting as she was dragged along in my sidekick’s talons.
The wrecked doors were twenty feet away, fifteen, ten.
Then, a skate shop’s glass facade collapsed outward, and a familiar-looking, gas-mask-clad figure crashed into the hall in front of us, filling the air with sickly green smoke. The smell of rotten eggs and almonds filled the hall, and I skidded to a halt inches from the toxic gas. As I backed off, Haze-Matt stood up, gas mask making a click-hiss-rasp as he breathed into it. “You. I remember you,” he said.
“No, you don’t. I’ve never seen you in my—“
“The car. You were in the car!” He started laughing maniacally and reached for a grenade at his belt. “I wanted that car, but they wouldn’t give it to me! Now I can have it!”
“Hello, Understudy. Greetings, Fursona. Get behind me, and me, and me,” a voice said. A moment later, the three red-and-gold triplet-bodies of Bud Lightbeam appeared between us and the villain. “I’ll keep you and your rescues safe until the rest of The Triad arrives!”
“You can’t deny me the car! I’ll have it!” Haze-Matt heaved the grenade toward me, and I used [Quick-Time Change] to shift back into Rainy Day. At the same moment, Lightbeam fired a beam that cut the bomb in half. A gray-orange gas started descending on us, and I used [Wind Front] to shove it down the hall, back toward Haze-Matt.
[Flashy Fitting Room! +1 Flamboyance Point]
[Badass Move! +1 Badass Point]
Then, a hammer-wielding, helmet-wearing figure shoved Haze-Matt, pushing through the gas cloud, and swung his hammer in a wide circle. Two Lightbeams vanished, and the third crashed into a wall. But the hammer didn’t stop there. It whipped around, slamming into Haze-Matt and knocking him back—
—And giving me an opening. I grabbed the man, who still hadn’t stopped filming, and started dragging him down the hall toward the food court. Hopefully, Haze-Matt hadn’t shoved enough gas onto the top floor to cover it. Hopefully, I’d be able to find my way to safety.
Hopefully.
[Powerful Heroes are Joining the Fight!]
[Names: Tele-Portal, Underdelver]
I breathed a sigh of relief, looking for the stilt-wearing support hero, but I couldn’t find her. The sounds of fighting intensified behind me, though, and when I looked, Underdelver’s mech suit had bored a hole through the mall’s floor and stood between the villains and us. Hammers clashed against drills, napalm filled the hall with choking—but non-lethal—smoke, and Lightbeam fired lasers into the clogged, opaque cloud.
I turned and kept running, but when I got to the food court, I stopped dead in my tracks and looked at it in horror. Sulfur-smelling yellow smog cascaded from upstairs in waterfalls, and the food court was already filled with the smog. It billowed toward us. We were trapped!
I looked for an option—any option—that’d give us some time or shelter from the incoming gas. It bore down on us, almost like it had a mind of its own. “[Wind Front]!” I shouted, blowing it back to buy us some time. Then I saw an open door to a store, and, without stopping to check what it was, I grabbed my Extra and dragged him toward it. Fursona followed a moment later.
[Badass Move! +1 Badass Point]
[Good Thinking! +1 Cunning Point]
We rolled through the door, which slammed shut behind us, and crashed into a mannequin wearing far too little clothing. “Is this…” I started to say.
“Victoria’s Secret, yeah,” Fursona confirmed. I looked around; lingerie surrounded us, and pictures of airbrushed supermodels in red and black bras covered every wall.
My Extra groaned under me, and I pushed myself to my feet. “Sorry. What’s your name?”
“Rob. Thanks, I guess, but we’re still stuck here. How do we get out?” The Extra—Rob—asked.
“Simple. We hold position until Tele-Portal gives us an out. If Haze-Matt’s gas gets in, we head for the back storage area, and we hope there’s a delivery door back there. We should probably check for that now,” I said, taking control of the situation.
[The Dark Hand of Capitalism: End of Act Two! Act Three in Five Minutes!]
[Appetite for Destructo: End of Act One! Act Two in One Minute!]
We walked slowly toward the back of Victoria’s Secret, passing some cute nighties I wished I could buy, and searched for a way out before this whole mess got worse.