A suggestion on SpaceBattles for a 10000-comment Omake led to this. Sorry about that... :)
"Does anyone else think this is weird?"
"I do." Legend raised his hand, making everyone look at him, then back to Alexandria, who had her hand up under her helmet visor, presumably pinching the bridge of her nose.
"I find it somewhat odd I have to admit," Armsmaster noted soberly, watching the image from Dragon's drone which was parked in the air about eight miles from them, the picture on the fifteen foot screen perfect and so high resolution that one couldn't even make out the pixels.
"Odd?" Alexandria dropped her hand and stared at him. "ODD?!" She pointed with one index finger at the screen. "That is not odd. It's weird."
Assault was staring at the screen from about ten feet away, his feet up on the nearest desk in the command post, a huge bucket of popcorn in his lap, munching away and grinning like an idiot. Beside him, a well-dressed woman in a suit with a fedora on was helping herself to his popcorn, intently watching the same thing with a faint smile on her face.
The cape in red guffawed at the action on screen, picking up a large soda and noisily slurping from it. Everyone in the command room looked at him, various expressions present, most of them showing exasperation to one degree or another.
"Where did you get the popcorn?" his wife asked, hands on hips. "And why are you such a pain in the ass?"
"In reverse order, because I can be, and from her," he snickered, not looking away, but jerking his head at the behatted woman beside him.
"And she is?"
"No idea. But she's good with popcorn and also appreciates a good joke." He shrugged. "What more do I need to know."
Battery sighed heavily, looking around at the couple of dozen Parahumans in the room. "You see? This is what I have to deal with all the time!"
"My sympathies," Alexandria said, glaring at the woman in the hat, who ignored her. Putting her hand into the bucket she looked disappointed when she found it practically empty.
"Door to popcorn," she said casually, then reached out her other hand and stuck it through the two-foot diameter portal that immediately opened next to her, feeling around for a moment with an expression of concentration, then pulling it back with a new, full bucket in it. She looked at it and sighed. "Door to salted popcorn," she snapped. Tossing the buttered popcorn through the new hole, she retrieved the correct snack and slotted it into the empty one that Assault was holding, grabbing a handful. He did the same, not apparently noticing.
Everyone in the room watched this with a certain amount of incredulity, but considering what was happening on the screen, it was a fairly mild piece of insanity.
"Aaanyway," Alexandria drawled. "That. What do we do about that?"
She waved at the projection, looking around for ideas.
"I'm not sure we can do anything," one of the capes from South America said doubtfully. She winced at the next action, then looked around when a tremble was felt through the ground under them a few seconds later. "You actually live with those things in Brockton Bay on a daily basis?" she asked, staring at Armsmaster and Miss Militia. The Tinker nodded absently, pulling out a pad and making some notes as he watched the screen.
"Interesting use of leverage," he muttered, scribbling frantically. "I wonder if the garment is required."
Miss Militia gaped at him, then the screen, then closed her eyes for a second or two.
"You do realize that this is rapidly heading towards being farcical more than anything else, right?" Alexandria said with a heavy sigh. "They're fucking playing with us now."
"They always have been, we've suspected that for years," Legend pointed out reasonably.
She glared at him. "I agree. However, up until now none of them was holding a sign on a pole saying 'Missed me!', now, was it?"
"True."
"The little hats with targets on are new as well," Assault giggled.
"I don't know if I can take much more of this," the female member of the Triumvirate moaned, slumping into a chair. "How is he?" she asked as an aside, glancing at the comatose form of Eidolon, who was on an emergency stretcher at the side of the room, Amy Dallon working on him. The healer looked up at her.
"Well, he's had a mild stroke, and from what I can see is also suffering from some form of psychotic break, based on his earlier actions. But that's not my field of expertise."
"Can you fix him?"
"I don't do brains."
Alexandria waved this off irritably. "I know that. Fine. Can your insane reptilian friends fix him?"
"Probably," she shrugged, standing up. "If you ask politely. They're not wildly fond of the big idiot, but they're good people, they most likely won't hold this against him."
Legend smiled at her. "Thank you, Amy."
"Sure, no trouble. I need to get back, though, since nothing serious is happening here." Pulling out her phone she dialed a number, then said, "Wormhole to my coordinates plus sixty feet north, please."
Putting her helmet back on as she put her phone away, she nodded to them all. "See you guys later. Call if you need me, but I have homework to do right now."
Leaving the temporary structure several people watched her walk towards the orange-bordered hole in reality that had appeared about fifty feet away, disappearing through it. The hole vanished immediately.
"You have some very odd people in Brockton Bay," one of the other capes, this one from Ottawa, said in wondering tones.
About thirty seconds later another wormhole opened up, Ianthe jumping through, fully armored and waving a huge warhammer.
"Hello, humans," she called, waving with a free hand. She looked around, then swung the hammer over her head, yodeled "By the Power of Grayskull!" and charged off into the distance.
Once more, Alexandria pinched the bridge of her nose. "They've been letting her watch TV again, haven't they?"
"Apparently," Legend smirked.
Metis jumped out of the still open wormhole, waved to them, then screamed "Leeroy Jenkins!" at the top of her voice and followed her sister, wielding a pair of scimitars as long as she was tall, electricity crackling from them. Everyone, even Assault and the Hat-Woman, watched her disappear over the horizon in a cloud of dust.
"I can't help but feel that popular culture has a lot to answer for," Miss Militia muttered loudly, staring in disbelief.
There was a massed murmur of agreement.
"I'm just glad that they picked the middle of the Sahara for this," Battery remarked. "Although I still can't figure out how Leviathan got here."
"As far as we can tell the Simurgh carried him from the Mediterranean," Armsmaster replied.
"The same Simurgh that is now wearing a World War One set of flying goggles, has a white scarf wrapped around her neck, and is zooming around sitting on a ten-foot-tall red wooden doghouse while Kaiju throws boomerangs at her?"
"Correct. I am unsure of the purpose of the doghouse." The Tinker made some more notes.
The blonde stared at him, then the screen, then her husband, before sagging a little and slumping in the chair next to him. He offered her the popcorn without a word, the woman taking a large handful.
"I give up," she mumbled softly. "I just can't handle today any more."
"Behemoth is back," Dragon said from where she'd been working on a complicated mechanism near the screen. "And I've managed to reestablish the audio feed."
Sound suddenly filled the room, battle noises at a high volume making everyone twitch. "Sorry," she apologized, adjusting the relevant control.
They watched as the first Endbringer emerged from the ground, stick out half-way and looking around nervously, from all appearances. On his head was an outsized baseball cap printed in red and white concentric circles.
Behind him from the perspective of the hovering drone, Kaiju could be seen sneaking up on him, dressed in an enormous martial-arts gi, and wielding an incredibly large wooden mallet, the handle fifty feet long and the head disproportionately large even at that scale, being as massive as the Endbringer himself.
She closed to within mallet range, screamed at the top of her voice, "Behemoth No Baka!" and brought the mallet whistling down, a visible shockwave racing out from where she struck him directly on the head. He vanished downwards, leaving a large crater in the desert, fused glass all around, the ground shock rumbling past the command post moments later.
Kaiju looked pleased, then ducked when a flying doghouse strafed her with small chunks of rock torn from the surrounding desert, the Simurgh leaning over the peaked roof of her unlikely aircraft with her scarf flapping behind her in the breeze of her motion. She was miming firing a large machine gun, the rocks coming from where the end of the invisible barrel would be.
Rolling to her feet, Kaiju dropped the mallet, which vanished as it left her hands, then threw the twenty foot long boomerang that appeared in her hand, the rotating blade zipping after the flying Endbringer. Looking over her shoulder the Simurgh shook her fist, then plastered herself flat and accelerated.
"Nice shot," Assault commented as the boomerang whistled past, curved around, and nearly took her head off on the return flight. The Endbringer was forced to do a quick and hard roll to miss being hit, but even so the thing removed the end of her scarf, which fluttered to the ground. Catching the boomerang with ease, Kaiju wound up and threw it again, leading the Simurgh by a significant margin.
Behemoth popped up behind her, firing a visible beam of heat at her, which made her gi burst into flames. She whirled, then reached out and slammed the mallet which reappeared in her hand down on his head, before looking around as he disappeared again.
Shrugging, she formed a new gi as the one she was wearing crumbled to ash.
"Point to Behemoth, I think," Assault commented to the woman in the fedora, who nodded, not looking away. He made a mark on the pad of paper next to his feet on the table. "Six to three, Kaiju's favor," he noted, glancing at it for a moment.
Alexandria sighed again.
Some distance from where Kaiju was taking on both Behemoth and the Simurgh simultaneously, they could see that Metis and Ianthe had arrived on the scene, engaging Leviathan, who was dancing around them firing blasts of water at them.
Everyone blinked.
He was literally dancing around them, shaking his tail at them, then spinning on his back a couple of times, before back-flipping away. A huge torrent of water, drawn from deep underground, shot towards Metis from his hands as he landed, the lizard simply swimming up it with strong strokes of her tail, grinning viciously and holding her scimitars ready.
"Ten to four odds on Metis taking one or more arms off in the next five minutes," Assault called, quickly calculating odds on his notepad.
"I'll take fifty dollars on that," the petite girl across the room chirped, flipping him a bundle of one and five dollar bills. He caught it without looking, noted it down, then glanced up.
"Oh, shit," he groaned. "Prospect! You said you'd stop doing that!"
"There is a 97.56% chance I will win," the girl smirked.
"We should never have allowed you to talk to that Zephron character at the DWU," Assault grumbled, shaking his head. "He taught you too much about gambling."
"There is a 100% chance you are correct," she giggled.
"Why are you even here?" he asked. "Shouldn't you be in school?"
"Saurial suggested I'd find it interesting," the girl shrugged. She looked around with a grin. "This is way better than school."
The ground trembled as Kaiju slammed her mallet down again, missing Behemoth who dived sideways at the last moment, made a rude sign with his hands, then vanished back into the ground. The area of desert the Family and the Endbringers were destroying looked like a section of the surface of the moon by now, but none of them seemed like they intended to stop.
"I wonder how we work out who won when they finally get tired of this?" Legend mused out loud.
"We score them on style, technique, and grace, obviously," the woman in the hat said as she retrieved more popcorn, her voice calm and amused. "I do hope this is being recorded."
"It is," Dragon replied.
"Good. Please make me three copies."
"Certainly."
"He's behind you! BEHIND YOU!" Assault roared, throwing popcorn at the screen, where Kaiju was looking around, the Endbringer now slowly creeping up on her.
Alexandria looked around the room, shook her head in disgust, then decided she might as well go home. Clearly the world had completely stopped making sense, and there was a show on TV she wanted to catch up on, not to mention she needed to feed the cat.
"By Grabthar's Hammer," a faint voice came through the drone, followed by a solid-sounding thwack noise. She looked over her shoulder to see Leviathan flipping end for end, Ianthe looking pleased. A strange sound accompanied the flying Endbringer.
She left the tent, trying desperately to forget the sound of Leviathan screaming "Wheeee!"
In this, she was ultimately unsuccessful.