At One with the Machine Chapter 2 (Original chapter Chapter 5)
Brockton Bay Central Bank
Cyber Sorceress fiddled around with the control set she had strapped to her arm as she watched via a drone as the Protectorate Wards arrived and started to set up a perimeter around the bank.
"Grue, you need to see this." She called over, making the helmeted man come over and peer at her screen.
"What am I looking at?" he asked.
"The Wards." She answered grimly, "ALL of them aside from Psycho Stalker, but with Glory Girl up top."
"Aw hell." Grue groaned, "Tattletale!"
As the two squabbled, Cyber Sorceress frowned as she tapped away at her control panel. Strictly speaking, she didn't need to use it, as she could control the drone via her Master ability, but she was still working on controlling the drone and doing other things at the same time. Besides, Panacea was here and would no doubt give a thorough debriefing to the Protectorate afterwards. Why furnish them with too many facts?
Beneath her helmet, a satisfied smile crossed her face as she successfully overlaid the images of Clockblocker and Aegis from outside with stock imagery from the PRT website, finding that either Aegis had had some muscles removed or someone else was wearing his outfit. Similarly, some of Clockblocker's outfit was stretched too tightly in key locations. Similar build or no, there was no truly one-size-fits-all outfit.
Absently, she glanced down at her new gauntlets as she removed the screen from it and set it up on a tripod on the bank's counter. She had managed to get some Tinkertech as part of her first payment from the Undersiders' mysterious boss (and didn't that make her hackles rise?). It had been exactly three things: a laser rifle, a sonic weapon and some sort of antigravity field generator.
Her Tinker power, once she had assimilated the blueprints, could do a great many things with them. She could create almost exact copies of the devices, but that was a boring, pedestrian way to use it. Instead, she miniaturised a few of them and combined them with other, more mundane appliances.
Take the laser rifle, which she was almost certain came from Toybox, probably one of Pyrotechnical's designs, for an example. She had made it into a fingertip laser blaster that varied in strength between a laser pointer and something that would leave a mark on solid steel. She couldn't get the full steel-cutting strength of the original laser rifle. She had also added in a slight electric charge from a stun gun/Taser in order to mess up the target's nervous system for a while.
That she had one for each finger and thumb was something of a point of pride for Cyber Sorceress and gave a whole new meaning to the term giving someone the finger.
Mounted on her hips and the small of her back were antigravity generators that allowed her to levitate and fly, but not really all that fast. Glory Girl was a much faster flyer than Cyber Sorceress was, so she was going to have to upgrade them at some point. Aside from flight, she could also use them to loosen gravity's hold on her and speed herself up, albeit at the cost of not having very much physical strength while under its effects.
The sonic weapon was built into her mask and had a variety of functions now, from allowing the wearer to block a person's hearing, to an ordinary sonic blast, to using a wide-area sonic scream that would almost certainly knock any baseline human unconscious, with the side effect of breaking their eardrums. That would completely drain the battery of the device for several minutes, however, so it was a last resort.
This was all in addition to the previous equipment loaded into her suit. While it was unimpressive defensively, she could dodge quite well and offense was the best for of defence in this situation.
"OK you two, enough arguing." She interrupted Grue and Tattletale, "We have plans to make and I have information."
Ten Minute later
Outside The Bank
"Armsmaster and Miss Militia will be here in ten minutes." Aegis informed the rest of the Wards, "They'll be bringing PRT backup as well."
"Good. I won't be able to stop Vicky much longer than that." Gallant said and grabbed his phone for the umpteenth time since they had arrived. With Panacea held hostage within the bank, the strongest Alexandria-type Cape in Brockton Bay had been chaffing at the bit to get in and get her sister out of there, with Gallant pulling on his relationship with her to stop her from doing something reckless.
The leader of the Wards, dressed in Clockblocker's uniform, noticed Kid Win fiddling with one of his laser pistols.
"Kid, what're you doing?"
"It's acting weird." The red and gold costumed Tinker answered. He was floating on his hoverboard as he said this. "Both of them have gone into diagnosis mode and they're not responding to the counter-command. I don't get it. I just did maintenance on them this morning!"
"Shit. You got any other weapons?" Aegis was not happy about this.
"Just one, and it's more of a laser shotgun than a laser rifle." Kid Win holstered his pistol and pulled the item off his back, "It's only just past testing and PRT approval."
As he pressed buttons and activated it, the front doors of the bank slammed open releasing a large bank of darkness that rolled over the wards like a fog bank. None of the Wards could see or hear, and their radios didn't work.
Aegis, in Clockblocker's costume, was the first to be struck by the Undersiders, with two large dogs turning him into a giant chew toy.
Clockblocker, in Aegis' costume, reacted automatically when he felt something slam into his body, slapping it and activating his power. Unfortunately, all he touched was a ball of thread that had unwound and was touching him as well, so when his power activated, it froze him as well as the string.
Kid Win swore as his hoverboard suddenly went mad and bucked him off, leaving him sprawled out on the ground. As he scrambled to his feet, he swore more profusely when his laser shotgun went into diagnosis mode as well, leaving him utterly defenceless. He was trying to figure out which way was which when a fist emerged out of the darkness and slammed into the back of his head, rendering him unconscious. Grue then stripped him off his pistols and shotgun before returning to the darkness.
Vista and Browbeat went back to back as soon as the darkness sprung up around them, with the touch-telekinetic ready to use his power at a moment's notice, the same applying to Vista. Suddenly, the boy's arm spasmed and struck himself on the chin, just over a nerve cluster that made the rest of his body falter and start to collapse.
"Browbeat?!" Vista said and spun around. As she did, a sceptre emerged from the darkness and jabbed her in the back, making her fall limply to the ground. The sceptre then jabbed into the still-recovering Browbeat's back, sending him crashing to the ground again.
Gallant used the flight systems of his armour to shoot up and out of the darkness, almost flying into Glory Girl, who had flown down in a hurry.
"De…no, Gallant! You OK?" the blond asked in concern.
"I'm fine, but I don't think the rest are." Gallant replied to his girlfriend, looking down at the cloying darkness below them, "That's Grue's darkness. When I was in there, I couldn't see or hear anything. It's going to make it tricky to fight."
"You have no idea." A female voice said in amusement. The two heroes turned in mid-air to see an androgynous figure floating up to them at a sedate pace. S/he wore a black bodysuit with sliver armour at key locations, namely the groin, chest, shoulders, hips, feet and forearms. Her helmet was a smooth full-face helm that was blank. How s/he could see Gallant had no idea.
"Who are you?!" Glory Girl demanded.
"I am the newest member of the Undersiders." The silver and black figure replied, "Please call me Cyber Sorceress. And now…you're mine, Gallant."
With that, she pushed a button on her gauntleted wrist and the armoured hero's armour froze up for a moment.
"What the…?!" Gallant gasped as his armour started to move all on its own, red warning lights flashing on his HUD, warning of a viral intrusion.
"Gallant? Gallant?!" the Alexandria Package yelled in worry at his stiff movements before whirling on the watching villain and demanding, "What did you do?!"
"The antivirus firewalls on his armour are really pathetic. I simply broke them down while I was in the bank and slipped in a little virus." Cyber Sorceress replied in amusement, "Right about…now, I gain full control over his armour. Gallant, attack Glory Girl!"
"NO!" he roared helplessly as his armour, heedless of his struggles to the contrary, pulled back a fist and slammed it into his girlfriend's stomach, although her forcefield protected her from the blow.
"You coward!" Glory Girl yelled at the villain, "Fight like a man!"
"I'm female."
"Yeah right!" the blond heroine snorted before she caught another of Gallant's punches, "Gallant! Can you fight it?"
"Sorry…n-no chance." The prisoner in his own armour answered, "The armour…it's too strong!"
"Dammit…"
"I'll leave you two to it then." Cyber Sorceress mock-waved at them before descending down to the ground through the darkness. Glory Girl would have pursued except for Gallant's armour clocking her one across the jaw.
A few minutes later, the darkness dissipated, revealing the defeated forms of most of the Wards lying on the ground, with Glory Girl still fending off Gallant's unwilling attacks. There was no sign of the Undersiders.
A few minutes later, Gallant stopped fighting Glory Girl and backed off, raiding a palm.
"It's stopped! I'm in control again."
"Shit, Dean. You OK?" Victoria Dallon asked her boyfriend as they both landed on the ground.
"Hands are sore, ditto for my arms." The armoured hero answered with a sigh, "Shit, they beat all of us as if we were green as grass! So much for the Undersiders being the 'Masters of Escape' of the Cape scene."
"What the…?" Clockblocker looked around as he unfroze, "Gallant? GG? What the hell just happened?"
"Us getting our butts kicked, Clock." Gallant sighed, "Glory Girl, can you go in and get Panacea? I think Aegis will need some help here."
"On it." The Alexandria-Type flew into the bank to get her sister.
The distinctive sound of Armsmaster's motorcycle could be heard approaching the bank, much to Gallant's dismay.
"Aw shitburgers." Clockblocker summed up their situation quite well with those words.
OK, so. This is a nice powerset. I really like it. Moving on. A few chapters ago, I said that Vista was the strongest Shaker in Brockton Bay. A reviewer corrected me and said it was Labyrinth. While technically true, I don't really count any of Faultline's Crew as Capes of Brockton Bay in the first place due to their status as mercs. Another reason is that Labyrinth has almost no control over her powers. They just happen around her when she uses them. Compared to Vista, who can bend space into a pretzel several times over, she is the epitome of power and no control. My opinion, just saying.