"Wheeeeeeee!"
Armsmaster tilted his head a little, listening, then turned to Assault who was standing next to him. "Did you hear that?"
The other cape nodded. "I heard something, definitely. From down there somewhere." He pointed down the side street towards the water's edge, which was perhaps a quarter mile from where they were standing. Both capes listened carefully.
They could hear a faint high-pitched roar coming from that direction, changing pitch and volume somewhat erratically. It was approaching them, making them tense a little, just in case.
In Brockton Bay, odd sounds were often the precursor to odd actions. Sometimes very odd. And possibly very dangerous.
"Wahooooo!"
They exchanged another glance. This had been louder, with a definite doppler shift to it, suggesting the source was moving at a considerable speed.
"AAAAAAAHHHHH!"
Something shot out of the side street, moving at an incredible speed, the roar suddenly becoming quite loud and now accompanied by a spray of mist and water. It zipped over their heads making them duck, zoomed past them, then bounced off the side of the overpass for the main road and dropped down behind the small embankment that led to a drainage channel to the bay.
"It's OK. I meant to do that," a familiar voice said, sounding pleased with itself.
"Isn't that..." Assault began. The roar, which had stopped, suddenly started again, the strange object reappearing from behind the concrete wall and ascending vertically at high acceleration on a dual trail of high pressure water. They watched open-mouthed as it disappeared into the low clouds a few hundred feet up, the water trail splattering down around them, then mysteriously vanishing a second later leaving everything dry again.
"...Saurial," Armsmaster finished with a sigh. Assault grinned, shading his eyes with his hands as he looked upwards.
"What the hell is that crazy lizard doing this time?" he asked rhetorically.
His companion shrugged a little.
"I've long since stopped trying to work out what any of the Family is doing, or why, I simply assume it's because it amuses them." His voice was resigned.
"Ohhh Shitttt!"
The voice sounded from a few hundred yards away, descending rapidly, making both of them whirl to look in the other direction. Saurial and the device she was standing on, which they could see looked like a small surfboard with two water jets or something like that protruding from the bottom, dropped out of the clouds going downwards vertically under power. They winced, expecting a huge impact, only to see her somehow flip end for end in the last fifty feet, decelerate at a rate that would have crushed most people, then tip over and roar towards them down the road at some huge velocity.
"WheeeeeHi Guyseeeeee!" her chirpy voice sang as she rocketed past. Both men were covered in cold water instantly, then seconds later dry again, as they turned to watch. Assault blinked while Armsmaster folded his arms and merely watched with curiosity and what his companion thought might be interested mild approval.
"Fascinating," he muttered. "She appears to have constructed a flight system using water as the reaction mass. I would assume that she is continually generating it in the thrust chambers with her matter creation ability, giving it a short life time. It allows it to impart momentum without requiring any machinery." They followed the figure zooming through the air, growing less and less erratic in her movements as time went on. She bounced off a couple of buildings with a thud that made them wince again but seemed to come to no harm.
The sun broke through the afternoon clouds and brightly illuminated the scene, a brilliant rainbow suddenly appearing in her misty exhaust cloud and making the flying lizard-girl look like she was propelled by light. Assault shook his head in wonder.
"She sure finds fun in life, doesn't she?" he commented with a smile.
Armsmaster nodded. "So it would appear."
Saurial seemed to have finally learned how to control her invention, coming to a halt a hundred feet up and hovering on a twin plume of water which disappeared before it hit the ground. Quite a large number of people had stopped to watch and there were dozens of phones recording the event. She tilted to the side a little, bending one leg, and ascended a few hundred feet in a tight spiral, followed by rainbows in the sunlight, then flipped end over end half a dozen times in a way that left Assault dizzy just watching, before dropping like a stone to her original altitude and resuming a steady hover.
Looking around, she waved, then tipped forward to about a forty degree angle and shot off into the distance, adroitly weaving between the buildings, leaving a cry of triumph behind her. They watched with a certain amount of incredulity as she vanished from sight, only to reappear shooting up the side of the Medhall building a few feet from the glass, flip twice as she passed the roof, then go almost horizontal as she accelerated hard across the bay and out towards the sea.
"Well, that's not the sort of thing you see every day," Assault remarked wryly when they could no longer hear the sound of her hydrojet device. Armsmaster looked at him, sighed, and nodded.
"No."
He looked back towards the bay for a moment, then seemed to shiver a little.
"What's the problem? She seems tough enough to take the crashes and she's flying it pretty well now."
"It just struck me that there's no reason in theory why such a device could not be scaled up to the point it could lift Kaiju. Saurial is one thing. I'm not sure I could handle the sight of a ninety foot tall sea monster flying down the street and laughing."
Assault stared at him, then followed the direction the flying reptilian girl had gone in with his eyes.
"That's… not entirely comforting," he muttered. Both of them glanced at each other, shook their heads, then resumed their patrol, busy trying to get the image Armsmaster's words had managed to produce out of their heads.
Slowly resuming normal operations, the street cleared from the momentary excitement, although quite a few people were looking up more than normal for a while. Eventually even they lost interest.
Brockton Bay had seen weirder.