Rising Phoenix Gaming

Springboard walked over to the pile of slag and hefted it onto his shoulder. He made his way back to the shuttle, and gently placed the pile down. "If he hasn't managed an android before now, it hasn't been because he wasn't smart enough. It was because he didn't need it yet. I expect more twists to show up in the future," Springboard said to Tempest.

"Can you handle this for a minute? Got to collect someone before he gets gobbled up by a jabberwock," Rosette demurred to Springboard, dusting herself off and summoning her weapon to hand from nowhere. A quick slash and reality bled purple and orange, man-sized rift forming next to the reincarnating redhead. Knowing the cameras were on them, she slipped through and into the pink-shaded mirror of the plaza where she and the other Guardians had just fought Steel Sovereign's very convincing replicant and his mooks. Good. No actual jabberwocks like she had joked. Those things had been hell to clear out. And it would be terrible if her... "Hey! What did you do to me!?" Rosette smiled at the outraged voice of the Legionary, closing the rift with a thought and turning on one heel to face him. Definitely no jabberwocks then. "Put you on ice while we dealt with your coworkers. Gonna need you to drop the gun and armor before I get you out though." The man looked defiant for a moment, weapon halfway up to shooting her with whatever exotic ammo it had before he cursed under his breath and started to comply. Odd. He looked more resigned then defeated, but Rosette wasn't going to complain as the clatter of metal played off the empty plaza around them. "Good," she purred, supressing the faint wince as she pulled on the impromptu stitches Tempest has applied. Another half-minute's waiting as the man stripped down to the under layer and she opened another rift back into the real world, leading them through.

Unable to move for a brief moment, Steel Sovereign was suddenly on the defensive, with both gauntlets disabled. The energy shielding was down, and a hyperspeed barrage managed to crack his armor in several places. The power system was failing, and there was no escape. He'd not planned on so many heroes to show up, a miscalculation this time. The only hope was that Tempest could be coaxed or goaded into using lightning again, but there was slim chance of that. He had risen from where he'd fallen, his arm a bloody mess, and he was smiling. "I'm not alone, and you badly underestimated my friends." "I admit, I did. I won't next time. This has been most informative. Goodbye." It was something puzzling, then they suddenly felt Steel Sovereign go limp, as if the armor itself shut down. All of them could smell the scent of burning plastics, and the center of the armor began to glow. "GET AWAY NOW!" Tempest's shout was enough to to see the others move away quickly. What followed wasn't an explosion, but a controlled conflagration, like a white phosporous incendiary grenade, as the Steel Sovereign they'd been fighting simply melted away into a hunk of slag. Tempest sent cold air to cool the metal hoping to potentially save some of the tech for Mainframe to analyze, but he didn't hold alot of hope for that. "Damn, this is both new and disturbing." Thankfully the hunk of slag that bad been their foe didn't have a human in it, which was par for the course for him, he was a villain, but he never killed needlessly. "He's never managed a android before. Where the hell did he get that tech." Tempest was concerned, as this represented a major threat upgrade to Steel Sovereign. He looked at his teammates. "We need to get back to Station. Rosette and Springboard, I need you to carry that" he indicated the hunk of slag" "to the shuttle, and Kitsune and Hyper, I need you two to go inside and find out what exactly brought him here, and if he got it or not. Round up any legionairres, but somehow I expect there to not be as many as we fought. I'm going to go talk to The police."

Hyper was momentarily disoriented y the teleport, so much that it took her a few seconds to get a handle on the new playing field. In that time everyone's attention had turned to Steel Sovereign with her companions taking various shots that ended with the armor clad villain being held in Rosette's iron-muscled grip! Hyper was personally miffed by what the lady goon had said, as stupid as that may be it sorta hurt. So with resolve to show that she was more than a 'one trick pony', she reached deep inside her resolve and pulled up every ounce of hyper speed she could muster and launched herself at the held miscreant Steel Sovereign! She was more than a blur as she strafed past Sovereign, pushing her speed into her arms and pummeling him with blows so fast that they registered as one massive blow! She passed him and spun on a dime her inertia contorted by her power to propel her back at he immobile criminal to land yet another series of blows and then again for a third time!

"An OPENING!" Kitsune launched herself into the air in a gymnastic leap...and even though he might be able to see through her manipulations of light and sound, she wouldn't be HER if she didn't put some spectacle into this! For just a moment, at the apex of her jump, a lens flare seemed to flash out from her. Over her head an arc of radiant discs appeared, displaying the lunar phases, with new and full side by side directly over her head. The two merged and swirled together into the form of a yin/yang symbol as she doubled over and fired off a particularly intense blast of coherent light from her hands down at Sovereign's armored suit! With the better angle from the high ground, and the timely assistance of her teammate in immobilizing the villain, Kitsune's attack was perfectly aimed! It struck with full force on the power conduit she'd spied earlier and started heating and sizzling the metal protecting it! (55 damage as a called shot!)

Having worked on-and-off with Tempest through much of the more-mundane portion of her heroic career, short as that may have been, Rosette could see that the weather controlling hero may have been down but wasn't out. She was moving soon as Springboard made his dash for their foe, ready to back up his grapple with her own enhanced strength. Wincing a little inside at the villain outfoxing her brawnier teammate, she redoubled her pace, letting her scythe go. The weapon melted into ghostly flower petals inches from her fingers, slipping between worlds until she might need it again. And then the Reincarnating Redhead was on Steel Sovereign from behind, sweeping one leg out from under him with the clang of metal on concrete. She flowed with the grace of mystically-imbued physical self-mastery atop him in a flutter of black and red cloth, twisting on of his arms behind him with the warning of joint-injuring pressure. "Hi," she exhaled with a laugh, gold eyes dancing with amusement at the small victory.

Springboard looked around, noting the condition of Tempest, and the damage both himself and Tempest too. Activating the communicator built into his helmet, he spoke in a very quiet whisper that was picked up and relayed to his teammates. "Gonna try to hold him down." He then did a short run at Steel Sovereign, and faked a jump, then aimed a slide at the space between Steelie's legs. Unfortunately for Springboard, SS read his intent from the very beginning and just closed off his positioning so he was unable to go between the legs, causing Springboard to stop short, and unable to attack. "Get Tempest out of here."

"As he predicted." the centermost Legionairre said quietly. "Time to go. Arm the device." The other four went to the large mortar looking device, which seemed to be spent, and each of them placed a hand on it, and it began to reconfigure. Once they took their hands away, she nodded. "This is Mithril. Phase III complete." There was a moment where they each began to shimmer, and then they were gone, as if they'd never been there. The rifles which had been taken collapsed into a liquid substance, as the nanites that comprised them simply deconstructed them, and then themselves. Down below Kitsune took her shot after noticing the power fluctuations, but the angle was wrong, even with his shields down. The beam seemed to play over the armor, leaving a smoking weld from wrist to elbow, but failed to penetrate the armor. "If you'd aimed abit better, that would have gotten through, tough break." The Sovereign answered the attack, even as his shield hummed and came back up." Tempest was watching the battle unfold, this new armor was powerful, and geared to fight his electrical attacks, he had others, but they'd do far less damage. He could try to overload the armor, but that put everyone at risk, as he'd already taken one of the powered up attacks. Noting how hot the barrel of the flamthrower was, he focused on creating intense cold there and when the superheated metal was chilled so rapidly, the weapon itself collapsed, one of the flaws of the nanotech the suit was made of. "A localized cold zone only a meter across, impressive Tempest. I'd never have guessed. It seems you're not just a one trick pony after all." Tempest chuckled. "I'm full of Surprises, Steel." The Supervillain seemed to focus in on Tempest, and his other gauntlet's top reconfigured into what looked like two short barrels. He fired Both in the span of a second, filling the air with veritable clouds of tiny razor edged flechettes. normally they'd have been no threat to his powerful shield, but something warned Tempest to not take it lightly. The first one missed, but clearly he'd expected his movement, and the second blast caught him. The flechettes penetrated the shield as if it weren't even there, and half a dozen imbedded themselves int Tempest's right arm and side, knocking him back and causing him to fall to the ground. "I told you that shield wouldn't protect you forever." He turned his attentions to the other Heroes, "Now, I believe it's time to finish up with you as well."

Kitsune wasn't sure how secure she was as she surveyed the combat from her perch on a nearby roof. Her image was down there, mixing it up, but her eyes were on Steel Sovereign. She could sense wavelengths of light with her mind that the eye was unable to perceive; deep into infrared and up along the shades of ultraviolet. Sovereign's armor was...a piece of work. Incredibly advanced, but she could see the buildup of heat along channels in it as he exchanged blows, or discharged weaponry. There was no threat of overheating; it very efficiently dispersed that heat. That dispersal was what made it visible to her though. Those were, she thought, the systems that distributed power through his armor. The arteries that kept the gears spinning. She couldn't spot the power source itself...but a generator without connections was useless. Sever the links, and eventually the suit would be dead weight. She focused her concentration narrowly; creating a laser beam wasn't easy. Light wanted to go all over the place. To make just one kind of light, all going the exact same direction...yeah, not easy. The atmosphere lit up though as a straight line of ionizing air molecules erupted in the path of a single, intense beam connecting her illusory self and Steel Sovereign's armor. He was in the middle of rolling with Springboard's kick though, so the beam didn't linger on the right spot as long as Kitsune would have liked. Still, she DID manage to thread that narrow needle, getting a glancing blow past the radiator fins that protected those thermal channels!

"Good thing for her that she has swiss army knife friends then, huh? Bye," Rosette taunted good-naturedly, dancing backwards from the legionary, having caught sight of Steel Sovereign's act of stellar retaliation against their two male team-mates. They had better places to be than fighting disarmed mooks that screamed 'distraction' to the reincarnating redhead's instincts. A brush of her hand against Hyper's shoulder and a swung scythe later, the five mooks faced naught but a pile of crystalized flower petals. Down below, the two heroines appeared flanking the armored mastermind. Rosette stepped away from her friend, weapon spinning in both hands as she took up a point placing Sovereign in the center of a square of heroes quite willing and hopefully able to kick his ass four ways from Sunday.

As Hyper and Rosette moved to handle the sniper and artillery squad, it was teamwork was spontaneous, Hyper once again managed to disarm the armed soldiers, and in other troopers, this might have caused panic, but the final trooper who hadn't been armed began to glow yellow, and moved forward. the gauntlets on his wrists began to shift, and soon they extended, looking like batons, yet coated in yellow energy. Behind him, the other five began to glow as well, clearly about to manifest the same weapons. "It must really suck to be a speedster with only one trick." came the female Legionaire's voice. For their part, both Rosette and Hyper got a tingling sensation in the back of their neck regarding the golden energy clad Legionaire. Below, The massive blow from Springboard actually knocked him back, bringing down his shield, and leaving a light dent in the armor. Almost instantly, a bolt of lightning arced out and hit Steel with a resounding crash of thunder, and they could hear him chuckle. "So predictable. That isn't a weakness of mine anymore, Tempest." The shield was back in place, and if anything, seemed stronger. "What now boy? Lightning's always been your big attack." He sent two blasts of energy back at Tempest, his own shield flaring and going down, the remaining energy enough to penetrate his armor and draw a grunt from him as the first hit, but he was able to dodge the second. "I can throw even more powerful blasts back at you now." He looked at Springboard, and his right hand reconfigured, becoming a large nozzle like device. What spewed forth was an almost blue-white flame, hot enough to melt stone and metal almost instantly. Kitsune meanwhile was focused on remaining undetected, seeking out the perfect opportunity to help put Steel Sovereign out of commission. NExt Round starts.

Springboard rushes forward, and leaps into the air, heading right for Steel Sovereign. As he closes the distance, his gaze doesn't waver from his foe. He shouts, at about 10 feet away from SS, "Hey, Steelie. Here's a little gift from me to you." He launches a kick that could stun an elephant at SS. The sound that follows the connection is quite loud. He lands right in front of Steel Sovereign, his guard up.

When Steel Sovereign's Soldiers spun at Rosette's greeting from behind them, they instantly leveled their rifles at the two Heroes' that had somehow gotten on the roof and behind them. But, before they could fire, HYPER went into action and trigger fingers pulled at empty air! "Sorry boys, but these are not the toys you should be playing with," she said now standing by the edge of the building holding the rifles in her own arms. With a wink she tossed them over the edge, "After you Rosette!"

"Ever the grandstander, Huh, SS?" Rosette mused with a chuckle, shifting backwards a few choice steps to be within arm's reach of Hyper. She glanced sideways at the other woman, meeting her gaze and flicking her gaze up to the watching snipers. The reincarnating redhead waited a heartbeat or three until she got a confirming nod back before extending her arm to brush the speedster's shoulder with a single finger. Her scythe flashed, and both women exploded into crystal flower petals, a matching burst depositing them onto the roof immediately behind the snipers, the flankers flanked. "Hello, Boys," she laughed, gold eyes twinkling with laughter to mirror her grin as she waited for Hyper to recover from the brief brush with infinity to do her thing faster than the eye could track.

Tempest was in the process of giving the order to escort the prisoner to the waiting authorities, and the high tech armor he was wearing seemed to crumble to dust and blow away on the wind, leaving the legionaire clad only in a black body suit. "So he is still here." "Everyone be on Guard, Steel Sovereign is still here, Springboard, see him to the police, I'm sure they'll have questions for him." As his teammate moved to do so, there was no incident, It was only when he began returning that half a dozen mortar shells rose into the sky from the roof, and landed in the plaza. The explosions didn't actually hurt anyone , but they raised a cloud of dust and smoke that Tempest immediately shifted his powers to blow out over the bay. As he did so, he heard the roar of thrusters, and Steel Sovereign landed there in the plaza. "You kept me waiting Tempest. That's not like you. He seemed to take in the other guardians present, and held up his hands. "I see you brought friends as well. I guess I should feel honored, but really, you brought the flower girl, the bouncing brick, one of the lightbenders, and what did you just pick a random speedster? Fine. I have minions too. Up above, on the roof, five more Legionaires were positioned with weapons aimed down at the heroes. This was odd because his minions always operated in groups of either 1, 6, or multiples of 6. An energy field caught the light just right, and he held his hands out in almost a welcome gesture. "Well, Let's get started."

Hyper managed to disarm 4 of the standing legionaires, before rosette literally sent one to another dimension. Tempest chuckled softly. "Banished him to the shadow realm I see." Springboard was in the midst of them, absorbing kinetic power and using it to down a second of them. Kitsune managed to hit the last armed legionaire with a powerful laser blast. It wasn't a fatal wound, but the shock of the blast knocked the legionaire unconscious. Tempest sent out a blast again, into two who'd just been disarmed, Their armor hissed and popped, and then promptly shudown, trapping them inside their armor. The first two, who'd been switching modes, also saw their armor lock up, due to electrical interference, and failure of the G-type equipment to activate. This left only a single unarmed Legionairre facing 5 guardians. Wisely he knelt down, deactivated his armor, and put his hands behind his head.

Only one of the monsters was still armed by the time Hyper had her way with them, and that one grunted something unintelligible...but by context was probably obscene. It lifted its weapon to sight down the barrel, when suddenly a scythelike beam of light raked across it, sizzling through armor and flesh alike and drawing a blackened line of sizzling alien meat where it had touched. Kitsune, tails swishing madly behind her and clad in her black suit and fox mask, had appeared at last, hands outstretched with the last of the beam's light fading from between them. "Ho ho!" she crowed, the mask's painted mouth curving into a mocking grin. "You're tougher than you look! Even so, you may as well surrender now! The battle is joined by the blazing...the AMAZING...the incredible...the INEDIBLE...KITSUNE!" And she did a pose and everything. Little fireworks exploded over her head.

Before her opponents could recover Hyper once again took off zig zagging around the room then straight at the thugs, weaving in and out faster than the eye could follow leaving four of the six holding air where their weapons had been! Hyper flashed to the window and the weapons hit the glass at hyperspeed turning the pane to sand and the offending weapons flew down to the ground below at close to 500 km/h, where even their tough build failed, turning them into scattered and broken components.

Springboard chuckled, mostly to himself, as the kinetic energy of the shots were dissipated across the muscles on his frame. The kinetic energy that got absorbed was amplified by the strange powers in his body. Focusing his mind for a second, Springboard forced the mixed energy into his muscles, stimulating their growth and power. When he opened his eyes after focusing the energy, there was a granite hardness to his gaze. His attention was shifted from his first target to the next one in line. He lined up the target and launched a knee to the stomach of that henchperson. The knee connected and the henchman dropped to their knees, then keeled over unconscious.

There were entirely too many well-armed and well-armored mooks in this fight for Rosette's liking. And her own strikes couldn't put them down in one hit. She did have one trick that could put them out of the fight. The Blind Eternities were calm enough to risk it in her, relatively expert, opinion. "Don't lose your head!" the Reincarnating Redhead called as she closed the gap to the closest unharmed mook, feet pounding the pavement as her scythe shifted color from solid red light to a wavering pink-purple glow that simultaneously demanded attention and eroded from memory, the Is-Not leaking into the Is in the heartbeats before impact. Being struck by that concentrated light would send the man hurling into an empty plaza beneath a technicolor sky.

While Springboard took the direct approach, Kitsune took advantage of the distraction to disappear. Likewise Hyper was given the chance to right herself, Even as the remaining 3 unscathed legionaires trained their weapons on Springboard. The two she'd hit, shot at her, but missed. "Goddamn she's hard to hit." "Switch to G-mode! that'll stop both of them." One of them said. Their shields didn't come back online was a signal. Two shots hit Springboard both were kinetic rounds. (30 damage each) Both Tempest and Rosette emerged from the ship to see Springboard taking the shots, and Tempest sent a bolt of electricity into the two of them, Frying their shields and bringing them down. (Top of the round post your actions.)

Springboard jumped into action, leaping towards the gathered henchpeople and Steel Sovereign. Once he landed he launched a powerful elbow strike at the closest henchperson, his blow connecting with the henchperson's chin. The blow snapped the target's head back with authority, also knocking them into the air for a small bit, with them landing prone, the armor on their chin visibly dented in.

"He's been getting better and better tech. I still don't know where his funding comes from." Tempest quickly set about tending the wound, disinfecting it and then removing several flechettes. He set them aside for later, and applied a gel they had a limited quantity of. It was cool to the touch, and instantly relieved her pain, and speeding up the healing of the damaged tissue. (heal 10hp) "There, that'll keep you up and in the fight, let's go join the others."

"Some sort of flechette round, Tempest, far cry from Sovereign's usual energy shot," Rosette volunteered, settling down on one of the flight benches. In a lesser situation, if there weren't so few Guardians on planet, she'd have shrugged off the medical care and been off to Hyper's side without a second thought for her own well-being. Just a flesh wound. She'd had worst, inflicted worse on herself to 'heal' more crippling injuries over a long weekend. The nature of the trade, really. The conflict danced in her golden eyes to a chaotic tempo, fingers of one hand drumming impatiently.

There was no way to stop the elevator doors from opening so HYPER didn't even try Instead she readied herself for what might come out. The doors opened and a hail of fire poured out, HYPER weaved in and out as the men poured out behind their fire. Six of them and all took aim at the speedster, but she had other plans. HYPER accelerated and zipped straight at them only to veer off and head right at the wall which became a track. At the speeds she was capable of any surface became her running surface and up, down all around she raced the soldiers of Steel Sovereign tried to get a bead but she was too fast and every shoo missed, then suddenly there she was. Hyper slammed to a stopped the rifle held cross ways before her striking two of the thugs whose shields flared as they were moved back a couple of feet. "Well S#@T! That didn't go as planned."