Inside the bank, Sophia hesitated. If she turned around now, it would only take a moment or two to reach the furthest extent of Brian's darkness on this floor, and she'd be able to switch back to normal and contact the other Wards. Throwing a glance over her shoulder, she could see the gloomy, watery light filtering through the darkness where it ended, but looking forward revealed nothing beyond the first few metres of the hallway fading into a murky, impenetrable black.

Unlike most people, Sophia could actually see in Brian's cloud, just not very well. After waiting an agonising half a minute, she growled a few choice curse words and started forward cautiously, moving as slowly as she pretended to be in this form. It wouldn't look good for her to stumble out of the cloud and faceplant because she was moving too fast and couldn't get her legs underneath herself in time.

Last time that happened Brian didn't let me live it down for a week.

A junction emerged from the thick haze ahead of her, and Sophia paused again, trying to remember the rushed briefing before she and the other Wards had piled into the PRT vans and set off. If she was remembering correctly, going left here would…

As she stepped into the junction properly, the darkness to her left started twisting with the characteristic violence that indicated Brian was letting it fade away. Just as it fell away completely, a figure bounded forwards into the now-clear space and pointed a gun at her.

"What the fuck?" Sophia blinked, voice distorted slightly. "Tattletale!"

The other girl threw a look over her shoulder. "Gotta be quick, act along, okay? Pretend you're really being held at gunpoint here, I told our newest member I could deal with you 'cause bullets hurt when- fuck, I didn't know they actually did."

"Hurts more," Sophia clarified sharply. "Not enough to stop me."

"Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all, though you and Brian really have to let me take a look at that interaction sometime. Mind, uh, sticking to the plan here?"

Sophia glared at her, but slowly lowered the crossbows. "Alright, what? You know how fucking dangerous this is, if Gallant-"

"Don't have to worry about him, I had Grue keep the darkness surrounding us so he can't see through. We should still be invisible to him. Now," Lisa shifted positions, correcting her wandering aim and pulling an apologetic face. "Sorry about the gun, but Bug Girl's got limited omnipresence - she can tell where all of her bugs are even in Brian's darkness. She saw you coming the moment you shifted back from your normal shadow state, and in Brian's cloud you're even more easily tracked."

Sophia froze before her eyes dropped and she quickly checked her costume for obvious bugs, doing her best not to move in the process. "I don't see anything. You haven't told her about me?"

"That's kinda the point, and no - doesn't seem like she'd be on board," Lisa rolled her eyes behind her mask. "Anyway, stay out of Brian's darkness and stay in your normal shadow form, 'kay? Makes it harder for her to track you."

"Got it, got it. Now, why the fuck are you doing something so risky?"

The villain chuckled. "Gotta clue you in somehow, and Brian coming was too obvious - they'd make that connection in an instant, and even if the Wards somehow miss it Bug Girl won't. She's a bit soft for your brother."

The leer that accompanied that revelation almost made Sophia gag. Lisa quickly explained the plan, only pausing for Sophia to name Glory Girl as the figure on the roof. At that, the villain swore quietly and stared off into the middle distance for a long moment, before a distinctly foxlike grin split across her face.

"I think I can handle that."

Sophia took an exaggerated step back as Lisa stepped forwards, knowing the other girl would pick up the disbelief from the gesture even before she spoke. "You? She'd pulp you the moment you opened your wise-cracking mouth - God knows it's hard enough for me to resist doing it."

Lisa shrugged. "Ha ha, very funny, but yeah - trust me on this one, okay? Brain beats brawn every time. Now, you need to engage Brian like usual, make it look vicious and try and keep to the front of the bank away from any of the hostages; bonus points if the Wards see you two going at it. I know what you two are like when you get into your spars, throwing each other all over the place."

"Gotta look real, right?"

"Think you can manage it?"

Sophia laughed darkly, left hand hefting one of her crossbows in anticipation. "I'll have to."

"Not the most reassuring thing you could've said right there but you'll do fine," Lisa returned, before throwing a glance over her shoulder and frowning. A cloud of bugs was gathering there, swarming together to form a cloud nearly as dense and thick as the one surrounding them. "Rachel's engaging your lot outside with Alec and Bug Girl's help…"

Again she hesitated, and Sophia couldn't help but frown herself. Lisa's eyes hadn't left the cloud of bugs behind her, and for good reason - whatever intelligence had kept the ball of flying insects together seemed to be… slipping.

"Lisa?" she asked quietly, shifting nervously in place. Her hands, resting at her sides, itched to wrap themselves around the triggers of her crossbows, but Sophia forced herself to remain calm. Tranq bolts wouldn't do any good against bugs, and her second load-out would just get her in trouble with the PRT. The other girl spun round, as if remembering she was there.

"Fuck, I gotta go. Go… left, then left, then right and take the third door on the left, should put you right over the lobby and well outside the darkness!"

With that, the blonde turned on her heel and darted off, the clouds of rolling jet fog parting in front of her as they had done before. Sophia stared after her, immobile, until the darkness coiled around itself and her in one smooth billowing movement. The heavy weight of the familiar interaction settled across her body again, and she shut her eyes to save herself the dizzying shift in perspective as the shadows at her core compressed and shifted sluggishly against Brian's power. Her skin crawled, a soft tingling sensation right at the surface where streamers of her shadow mixed and merged with twisters of Brian's. The sensation calmed her, and after a couple of deep, if unneeded, breaths Sophia turned to the leftmost hallway and set off.

The darkness spread through most of the second floor, and at one stairwell Sophia could see it extending upwards as well. It was difficult for Brian to fill spaces of this kind of volume normally, which meant he must have started pumping out the thick shadow the moment he and the rest of his team entered the bank. Lisa's directions were true, however, and by the time she'd taken the first right the boundary between normal space and Brian's cloud slowly grew from a faint lightening of the darkness ahead to the tattered boundary and then Sophia was clear, gasping slightly as her human form rushed up from her core to reimpose itself over her body.

I hate that feeling, she grouched, letting the cool wave of her normal transformation wash over her as she darted from the corridor to the indicated door. Once through, Sophia found herself at the front of the bank. Here, Brian's darkness didn't stretch high enough to obscure the sight of the ongoing conflict on the road outside.

"Oh for fucks sake," she mumbled under her breath, eying the walls around the windows. Electrical wires ran through them like veins through skin, and even the glass panes had wiring fanning out from alarm systems in the corners. Obviously the Bay's biggest bank took its security - or at least its front facing security - seriously.

On the other hand, it prevented Sophia from jumping into the fray, if it could be called such a thing. As she watched, Kid Win picked himself up off the floor and leapt onto his hover board, flying in a gentle loop over the battlefield and peppering one of the three mutated dogs with red-tinted lasers to no obvious effect. A moment later, his left foot seemed to twitch and the Tinker crashed face-first out of the sky into the windscreen on one of the PRT vans, cracking it severely as he bounced to the floor. Sophia heard a cackle from a room or two away, and shook her head. Alec was obviously enjoying himself at Chris's expense.

The remaining three Wards at the front of the bank were playing keep-away with all three dogs. Aegis, the white costume he'd adorned now shredded, looked significantly worse for wear but maintained his divebomb-cum-human meatshield approach, slamming into one of the beasts that was about to pounce on Gallant as he retreated from another. The dog, to its credit, seemed barely phased by the high velocity human missile, and twisted its head almost a hundred and eighty degrees to snap at him. Several PRT troopers threw themselves out of the way as the pair, still trading blow for bite, tumbled into the side of the other PRT van and upended it.

Clockblocker staggered slightly as he stretched out into a full-length dive for the dog, aiming to tag its tail, but fell short. Before the Ward could pull himself to his feet and try a second time, darkness flooded the road again and most of the combatants were hidden.

Sophia rested her head against the cool glass, feeling her forehead slip through ever so slightly. "For fucks sake," she repeated again with feeling.

"-talker?" Her earpiece crackled and spat static.

"Vista?"

There was a pause as the younger heroine sneezed. "Oops… Uh, wh-... ng on?"

Damnit, the earpiece is falling apart already. Sophia briefly wondered if her denser state in Brian's darkness had accelerated the decay before putting such thoughts aside and focusing on the battle in front of her.

"Front of the bank, everyone's engaging Bi-Hellhound's dogs and getting wrecked. Grue keeps covering the place with his fucking darkness, I'm gonna go find the bastard."

Sophia didn't quite hold her breath as she waited for the response, but it was a close-run thing. "Okay, but be ca-..."

The younger girl's voice cut into static again, and Sophia angrily tapped an insubstantial finger against her ear in the hopes of fixing the bud. There were two sharp pops and then a yell that coincided with Gallant being bodychecked out of the shifting mass of shadow on the road by one of the dog's long prehensile tails, before the earpiece gave up the fight completely and started hissing static. With a grunt, she extracted it and flicked it into the wall, waiting for the soft crack as it imploded the second her own shadow wore off.

At least the damn thing lasted this long. She was quietly thankful for that - maintaining a decent cover would have been all but impossible otherwise.

Turning her attention to the floor, Sophia reached up and twisted a dial next to the lenses of her mask. With a dizzying twist in perception the tinker-tech highlighted all of the electrical wiring below her, and Sophia cautiously allowed herself to drift downwards between three thickly pulsing conduits of energy. As she alighted on the first floor, she turned to the window again, but Brian had covered these with his power and apart from a few metres on the other side of the glass she could see nothing.

This is going to shit far too quickly, she growled to herself, prowling across the room to a corner with only one strand of electrical wiring. A brief check on her crossbows told her both clips were full and waiting to be used - logically, she knew that anyway, but the routine check helped calm her nerves. Her future in the Wards depended on how realistic she and Brian could make the next few minutes look.

Sophia hesitated, then dropped to her knees. Sometimes the strong got away with barging into a fight unannounced, and other times they didn't. Today, she'd play it safe. Manipulating her power's innate limiters, she kept her legs and hands substantial enough to hold her weight above the floor and cautiously ducked her head down through the concrete. There was a moment of disorientating blankness as her senses automatically cut off, and then she was through.

The room below was in chaos. Brian, in full costume as Grue, stood by the door, staring intently out into the rolling black mists of his power, occasionally twitching as he manipulated parts of it for his team's benefit. Lisa was crouched next to a girl in a dark, skin-tight costume that Sophia didn't recognise at first, but when the blonde girl shifted to look at the hostages huddled off to one side she caught a glimpse of a scintillating mass of things crawling over the carapace of the girl's armour.

Bug girl.

Sophia pulled her head back through the ceiling quickly, worried the apparently semi-omniscient cape would notice her arrival, but after thirty tense seconds no one stormed into the room. Even more cautiously than before, she pushed her head through the floor again and focused on the pair of villains. Lisa had been distracted by the bugs earlier and left in a hurry - did that mean something was wrong? Now that she thought about it, the girl did look to be in pain and the bugs around her didn't look like they were moving with any human intelligence. Lisa yelled something to Brian, who wheeled around and jogged across the lobby, dropping to one knee next to the mass of insects.

"Shit!" That was her brother's voice - Sophia could hear him swearing from her corner of the ceiling. Whatever was happening, it wasn't going the Undersider's way. She'd have to act fast, distract Brian and hopefully the rest of the Wards long enough for them to get clear. It was going to be a close-run thing.

Taking one last deep breath to steel her nerves, Sophia shut her eyes and pushed her transformation as far as it would go. The icy sensation prickling her skin built to a crescendo of biting cold as she slipped through the wire-free section of the floor in an instant before reversing the flow of her power, drawing herself in as she landed in the classic Alexandria pose - half crouched with one hand pressed against the floor.

Brian span round almost immediately as her feet landed in the darkness pooling along the floor and the bitter chill left her bones in favour of the soft weight of their interactions. "Shit! It's Shadow Stalker!"

She didn't give him a chance to say more, bursting into motion even as one crossbow came up. The bolt went wide by mere inches as Brian threw himself sideways, forewarned by her deliberate hesitation before pulling the trigger. Several bugs started moving in her general direction, but in her denser alternate state Sophia ignored them like the nuisances they were. Brian was on his feet again, turning to face her with a carefully telegraphed right hook that she avoided by dropping to her knees, slipping under his guard and slamming her other crossbow into the back of his leg as she passed.

He didn't go down, instead going with the impact and spinning on the spot whilst darkness rolled down his arms like thick oil. A foot lashed out, slamming into her chest and forcing her backwards, but the blow barely registered to Sophia. She knew she outclassed him, and so did he, but this wasn't about winning. One crossbow fell from limp fingers as she pretended to gasp for breath, shoving herself backwards and into the shadows clinging to the walls. In this state there was no way she was gaseous enough to slip through the walls, but she could push herself halfway at a pinch. Brian's next haymaker crunched into the facade behind her, eliciting a yell of pain as he stumbled backwards.

Sophia flowed gracefully to her feet, pushing the advantage. With her remaining crossbow, she aimed a blow for his shoulder that forced him sideways to evade, into the vicious upwards kick that nearly clipped his helmeted head. He took one step backwards, and then another, pausing to regard her carefully. She allowed him the moments respite, lifting the crossbow and pointing it at the still-immobile Bug Girl.

"Don't move, asshole, or I'll nail the girl."

Brian laughed once, and lunged. It was a weird sensation being body-checked when her opponent fell into her body by a few millimetres, but they'd trained with their powers rigorously. As Brian turned the lunge and grab into a well-executed throw, Sophia felt herself leaving his darkness, and the icy sensation exploded outwards as shadows replaced the thick clinging smoke of her other form. She drifted across the bank, returning to human long enough for her brother to turn and gesture, cloaking her in darkness.

Undeterred, Sophia pushed forwards, launching a flurry of blows that had Brian stepping backwards out of his darkness. He managed to knock the other crossbow away, but suffered for it as she drove a punch into his gut. Brian dropped messily, gasping for air, and Sophia felt a flare of panic as she realised she might have overdone it. In this state, she was stronger for her density, but it meant regulating her attacks a lot more than usual. Around them the darkness began to fade as her brother rolled onto his front, still heaving gulps of air into his lungs.

Shit! Make this believable!

"Anyone else?" She barked, turning to face Lisa and Bug Girl. A quick glance over her shoulder revealed one of the three mutated dogs frozen in midair, with Bitch running a fighting retreat against Gallant, Clockblocker and Aegis. Vista's power was in evidence, but the organic nature of the combatants limited her effectiveness.

A cough from behind her alerted her to her mistake. "I'll go for another round."

Goddamnit Brian, couldn't let me look good, huh?

Her brother's leg took both feet from under Sophia in a smooth sideways swipe as he used his hands to spin himself around before flipping to his feet. She automatically let her shadow state burst outwards, only to notice Alec a moment too late as he stepped out from a bank of darkness with his taser already crackling. At least, she thought it was the taser - it could easily have been the teen cackling madly at his next opportunity to run several thousand volts through her.

"Oh you've gotta be fucking-!"

She was dimly aware of Lisa jumping to her feet and pointing at one of the hostages, yelling something Sophia couldn't make out through the pain as her power struggled to deal with the electricity pulsing through her body. Then, in a thunderous roar, the two remaining dogs arrived in the bank with Rachel astride the first, and consciousness seemed to take a brief hiatus as Brian blocked out the road again.

Full awareness returned, and with it came the stinging twinge of being tased yet again, although in her extra-dense state it hurt far less than in her shadowy state. Sophia growled deep in her throat and pulled herself to her feet cautiously. She was off to one side of the room, away from the hostages, and the still ongoing battle. From the looks of things, she'd only been unconscious for half a minute, if that. With a chuckle, she made the transition to her other state in case someone noticed her awakening, and glanced around hurriedly.

At the front of the bank, a full-scale brawl had broken out in the time she'd been out of action, the conflict between the dogs and the Wards now inside the lobby itself. Brian slipped between columns of darkness, sweeping Gallant's legs from underneath him every opportunity he got and demonstrating just how much his training had paid off. The suited Ward could barely keep his feet for ten seconds before his opponent sent him tumbling to the floor again, and his emotion blasts dissipated uselessly against Brian's darkness. One dog had Aegis in its jaws, repeatedly throwing him against the wall at Bitch's command, whilst Clockblocker seemed to be making no progress up the steps at the front of the bank as his legs betrayed him repeatedly.

Sophia assessed the situation, doing her best to keep her emotions under control as she took in the cluster-fuck the Bank had descended into. Lisa was almost at the hostage she'd indicated, whilst Bug Girl was still out of action. As much as she wished she could help Brian, her duty was to the Wards, and anything else would bring suspicions down on her head. As it was she hoped Gallant was too distracted by the darkness and Brian's continuous attacks to notice her emotions.

God knows I'd be fucked if he was paying me attention, she briefly mused, before crushing that and other dangerous thoughts under her metaphorical boot-heel. There were more important matters at hand.

Both crossbows were nowhere to be seen, so instead of ducking and weaving whilst making use of her mobility to avoid combat, Sophia threw herself straight into the fray. Alec managed a startled yell as she swiped the taser from his hands and turned it on him, but managed to disrupt her hold on it just before the prongs made contact. The sceptre skittered away across the floor and Sophia pulled the other teen into a painful armlock.

"This is for tasing me again, dumbass," she murmured in his ear, just before her whole body convulsed and she was forced to revert to her shadow state to end Alec's influence on her. They faced off again, he making a quick gesture to send Clockblocker smashing to the floor with a painful crunch. Over his shoulder, Sophia could see the third dog through the wavering darkness as it reanimated, landed, shook its head in confusion before orientating on the sounds issuing from the bank.

She couldn't suppress a wince as it ploughed straight into a recovering Aegis and flung him like a ragdoll into Gallant, sending the two heroes sliding across the floor in a tangle of limbs.

Alec eyed the downed pair. "Well look at that, I guess villainy really does pay. Not every day you get to see heroes in that kind of state, huh?"

Sophia didn't honour the comment with a retort, instead choosing to kick him in the balls; the target had absolutely nothing to do with her repeat tasing at his hands. At the last moment her leg jerked sideways, foot catching Alec in the thigh as they both crashed to the floor.

It put her in a perfect position to see the wall next to them explode outwards as a white streak slammed through at high speeds, clipping Brian's shoulder before sweeping up both Lisa and the girl she was struggling with. The trio vanished through the doors at the back of the lobby, leaving them swinging on their shattered hinges before finally coming to rest half-shut.

"Glory Girl, no!" Someone who might have been Gallant yelled, but Sophia barely paid him any attention. Brian was back on his feet, if unsteadily, one hand pressed against his arm in an effort to stem the ruby blood bubbling out from a rent in his costume where he'd hit the wall badly. The bug girl was fending off Clockblocker behind him, swinging a baton into his face only for him to freeze it dead in the air.

Brother and sister made eye contact through their respective masks, and he made a jerky motion with his head. The message was clear.

Fuck you, Brian, Sophia mentally yelled at her irresponsible, stupid, idiotic imbecile of a brother, before turning and sprinting for the doors into the back of the bank and the three capes beyond. He never lets me fucking look after him, stupid big brother syndrome thinking he's gotta be the tough guy all the time!

A gunshot rang out from behind the doors just as Sophia ran straight through them in her shadow state, not willing to slow down for anything. Her mental tirade faltered and died as she took in the scene in front of her: a bloodied Lisa to one side, standing with her gun leveled at a horrified Glory Girl and another frizzy haired teen Sophia was only now recognising as Panacea. There was a moment of hesitation, as if everyone in the room was holding their breath.

"Sorry," Lisa mumbled.

The pistol stopped shaking as if by magic as the villainess took a steadying breath, locked onto Glory Girl's forehead. Sophia barely had the chance to notice a bullet already flattened against the blonde's tiara before Lisa pulled the trigger again, the report deafening her to everything but the other Dallon's scream.

"Vicky!"

Oh fuck me.