Scene 7 - November 6th

Exterior Training Grounds, Continuous

Quinn Kaufman

With the weapons passed out, we grabbed our respective flags - each hung on a large pole, currently being carried by Sequoia - and an earpiece each, then split off to head to opposite ends of the elaborate arena. It looked a great deal like a few blocks of the city, although bare and undecorated - as we walked, Simone told me that it could be reconfigured into a ton of different layouts. We would get ten minutes to plan and to find a place for our flag before the game started.

“Anyone object to me taking charge?” Loki asked when we reached our starting point. “No? Good.” He held out the box that had contained earpieces. “First off, put these back, they’re a trap as usual.”

“How so?” I asked. Everyone else seemed to know what he meant, though, so I pulled mine out of my ear and returned it.

“Starling is a tech hero,” Hypnos explained. “He hacks the system every year so they can listen in on us.”

“In the past, we’ve had three options. I can manually operate a magical comm system, which that takes up so much of my attention that I can’t do much leading - we can forget the comms entirely and operate without coordination, which never goes well - or we can use them, and accept that we’ll be listened to when we do.”

“We won last year with them listening in,” Simone said. “But... the year before, my first year, we lost with you coordinating instead of leading, Loki. Why go back to a losing strategy? I assume that’s what you’re doing.”

“Because last year’s strategy isn’t going to work again,” Loki explained. “We had Referee with us then, and no one else had realized quite how much of an equalizer she is. And Vulcan was on our side too, and...” he sighed. “Blue Phoenix as well. This year, however, we’re on our own, and we have a distinct lack of firepower.”

“How so?” I asked. “We’re losing out on bats, yes, but you’ve got the best weapon out there.”

He shook his head. “In theory, sure. In practice? Lasers are a lot easier to aim than guns, and shockwaves I can flat out control even as I aim them. I’ve never been good with guns - it’s not going to be helpful at anything but close range.”

“So what’s the strategy, then?” Hypnos asked. “We’re losing on power, after all.”

“We do have four advantages,” Loki reassured us. “Number one is that we’ve got Newton with us now. That means that even without Referee, we outnumber them five to four.

“Number two is that the flag system benefits us, not them. We have Journey,” he said, gesturing to the buff woman, who flexed. “Who can instantly take any of us to the flag if it needs to be defended - even Sequoia.

“Number three is... Sequoia, bring that flag down here for me.”

The currently-wooden man tilted the flagpole so Loki could reach the flag. He pulled it off and handed it to Journey, then produced an illusion of the flag and hung that on the pole instead.

“Number three,” he said with a smirk, “is that we can obscure our flag much better than they can. In fact...” He created five more illusions of the flag and handed one to each of us - the actual flag, he tapped and turned invisible. “This way, they’ll have no idea where the flag is. Journey, I’ll have you hide the real one somewhere after the game starts.”

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“This seems like cheating,” Sequoia observed.

“Nothing in the rules against it!” Loki said cheerfully. “If Canaveral didn’t want me exploiting the rules, he shouldn’t have added them.

“Then... why did Canaveral add in a flag at all?” I asked. “Seems like it really tilts the odds in our favor.”

He shook his head. “I’m sure he has a plan to protect it. Keeping it on his person, for example - getting it away from him, or from Vulcan for that matter, wouldn’t be easy. But we have a much better chance of being able to steal a flag than taking out four of the New Champions - honestly, I think we’d be lucky to take out half of them.”

“Can we go back to the earpieces thing?” Hypnos asked. “Are we going without coordination, or we going with you as our tactical lead?”

Loki grinned. “Neither!” he said. “I’ve been working on this spell for two and a half years, and it’s advantage number four...” He brought his hands together and they blurred as he began making complicated signs. His brow furrowed in concentration - this was by far the longest illusion I’d seen him create. About half a minute later, he had produced a faintly pulsing orb of green light. He then somehow divided it into five and handed us each one of the orbs, each about the size of a grape. It felt very odd to be holding something with no physical presence - there was only a faint vibration for physical feedback.

“What are these?” Journey asked, curiously.

“These are magical earpieces,” Loki told us all proudly. “They’re probably the single most complicated spell construct I’ve ever created - not visually, they’re invisible once applied...” He demonstrated by pressing the orb he still held to his jawline just below the ear, and it sank into his skin. “...but in terms of behavior.”

“How do they work?” I asked.

“Exactly like the standard technological ones, down to the speaking codes. 'Broadcast’ at the start of a sentence sends your next words to everyone, or the name of a person - speaking of that, ‘Designate Self: Loki’ is how you set your name for the network - sends to that person. I finished that about six months ago, so I also had time to add a few extras features before I used them for the first time in this game - along with broadcasting to everyone or directly to one person, you can create smaller groups to communicate with, they’ll blur out your speech to anyone without one while you’re broadcasting... I even added a speaker function!” He pressed two fingers to his jawline below the ear and spoke. “It controls your volume according to the position of your pinky finger. Point it down and you’ll be quieter, point it up and you’ll get louder.” He waggled his pinky as he spoke to demonstrate.

“Loki, that’s very cool,” Journey said, applying her magical earpiece, “but we have a limited time here. What’s the gameplan? Designate Self: Journey,” she added.

“Journey, you’ll be transport,” Loki began. “Don’t worry about fighting, just stick with me except when I tell you to take someone somewhere. Hypnos, come here a sec.” Loki tapped Hypnos - who was still the only member of the Journeymen not to share his identity with me - and the young man faded from view, except for the still pulsing green light in his hand. A moment later it moved up to were his head must have been, and it too vanished. “I want to have you be our stealth. Get to the flag if you can, and slip away with it.”

“I can fight,” he promised. “I’ve been working on my martial skills a lot since last year, and there’s the new trick you helped me with...”

“I know you can, Hypnos,” Loki promised, “but I want to keep that as a last resort, just in case. Your stealth skills are great too, remember?

“Now then, Sequoia, Newton,” he said to me and the redheaded dryad, “you two are floating hunters. We’ll need to distract them from Hypnos, so Journey will be ferrying you around, dropping you into and pulling you out of battles at my direction. Take them out if you think you can, but the goal is to keep them occupied more than to actually beat them. Don’t take risks when you can keep drawing out the battle instead. Got it?”

“Got it,” I said, hesitantly. “I wish I had had time to train before this, though...”

“You’ll do fine,” Loki said, putting a comforting hand on my shoulder. “Just focus on the task in front of you.”

“What will you be doing?” I asked him.

“Me? I’m on overwatch. My powers will give me a picture of everything that’s going on, and I’ll direct you guys. Are we ready?”