<div class="floatleft">(https://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/6/64/Ghost_shark_girl.png)</div><strong>Darclight</strong><br/><br/>The first thing that Darclight saw upon entering was that the bath was occupied!  A girl with a long mermaid-esque tail, fins sweeping from her arms and back, with faintly dyed hair and a pink eye... it took a second to recognize her as faintly-translucent, for Khaj to register that she had no immediate physical presence, oh, and the flame pouring from her other eye. One of the Queen of the Netherworld's spirits, most likely.<br/><br/>The second thing he noticed was that the previously nice-but-compact shower complex, suitable for quick hygiene for a busy hero team on the go<em>and</em>for privacy, had been converted by Sultana into a positively<em>palatial</em>baths, with taps every couple of feet, a series of arcane switches behind each one, and the faint scent of perfume and incense.<br/><br/>"Hey!" the ghost-girl threw a little wooden wash-bucket (Khaj calmly registered spiritual telekinesis in her new file) at Darclight, which missed and hit Auxilia square in the face. "You're not the Mistress! What are you doing here?!"<br/><br/><strong>Tabs</strong><br/><br/>The process was... not flawless! Infusing a solar system or even a sun into a random mostly-human teenager was fraught with peril, and Tabs had to make a whole lot of conceptual spaces fit together that weren't even supposed to exist on dimensions below the twenty-seventh!<br/><br/>It didn't help at all that she got a text when the process was nearly complete. It was from a one Besiruilbu, medical demon! The demoness had taken... well, it was a very compromising selfie to send to Tabs.<br/><br/>Judging by the way her luxurious purple hair was hanging down, she was upside-down. Her hands were behind her back with white ropes covering her body indicating they might be bound there, and her tail showed partly in the foreground - she was probably using it to manipulate the camera. There was a gag in her mouth and a blindfold over her eyes, both etched in sealing runes.<br/><br/>The caption read, all tied up at the moment, but I could make time for some kind of mad sorceress hero <3<br/><br/><strong>Ace, Kanina</strong><br/><br/>The water on the beach was as blue as crystal, and the sun glinted- we've done this already. The beach was sunny and warm and relatively well-populated and would have been perfect except that everyone was staying away from the water, and they could see a human-ish someone's head bobbing up out of the water. Ace's super-vision immediately identified finned ears (http://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1451964847i/17626612._SY540_.jpg), gill slits on his neck. Hey! A<em>real</em>tourist!<br/><br/>"Hey!" he yelled, "I said bring me a martini! What's a guy have to do to get service around here?" The human tourists were very politely but<em>very</em>pointedly pretending he didn't exist.<br/><br/>"See the coast, they said," he grumbled to himself, too soft for Kanina to hear, "see the world, they said! Meet cute land-dweller girls, they said! This is as bad as that Candy Mountain boondoggle."<br/><br/><strong>Some Time Later! (All threads continue in IC2, if desired)</strong><br/><div class="floatright">(https://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/0/0f/Refire_war_room.png)</div><br/>Silva Atel stood at the front of one of the Stormwatch HQ's situation rooms - it was a little bit in tatters, but the projector and the screens still worked, with numerous Auxilias manning consoles, as well as sweeping away debris and bringing coffee. (The logistics  - or even necessity - of Auxilia determining which Auxilia had to get coffee were probably better left unexplained.)<br/><br/>"Minerva and Recluse never thought I'd be here, doing this. Thought I was too addicted to the life to even consider it. More fool them! So they were pretty chatty."<br/><br/>With a touch of her clicker, the words<strong>ZOHAR CONTROL PROJECT</strong>came up at the top of the screen.<br/><br/>"I'll start with the big guns. Minerva believes they've captured Zohar's brain. No, that's not quite right. They think they have trapped a sentient light-energy being of the same kind as Zohar. It's smaller and weaker, but according to Minerva it's much smarter - the brains to Zohar's brawn. If her theory is correct, the reason it's been so stupid all this time is that it's been missing its counterpart. It calls itself Luminary; they're holding it deep underground, hidden away in a series of magically-active caves. I don't know where they are, how to get in or what we'd find when we got there, but it represents Recluse's trump card in his bid to control the beast."<br/><br/>"Next is the guard that seemed to hold Zohar's weakness, who they have captured and are holding in much more mundane circumstances. I believe we can track that lead down much more easily."<br/><br/>"William Blount," Auxilia displays a completely ordinary dossier, probably even too ordinary for a supervillain prison guard (anybody with the bravery to contain angry supervillains was going to be<em>quirky</em>at best - and a common psychological profile involved the words "starved for vengeance"), "there's... absolutely nothing special about him at all. He doesn't even have any traffic tickets.<em>But</em>, he's not registered on the Ancestry project, so there might be some lingering magical or alien lineage?"<br/><br/>"Injuring him... damaged Zohar in some way. Maybe not physically, but mentally or psychically. Arachne said it 'flipped its marbles.' Her words, not mine. They're hoping to extract whatever makes him its bane. I would consider that 'low-hanging fruit.'"<br/><br/>"They're recruiting Jorias Quinn, who they're assuming will be responsible for the super-science involved in the actual control. They're also targeting people with the power to control light or darkness - mostly heroes or unaffiliated rogues. This is a list of the ones Minerva mentioned, which I don't need to remind you is not necessarily exhaustive. There aren't any outright villains she mentioned," she bit her lip, "so they've probably got nothing pleasant planned for whoever they lay their hands on."<br/><br/>The list read:<br/>-Eclipse; Idol Singer; Unaffiliated; New York City-State<br/>-Night Sparrow; Hermit; Unaffiliated; British Columbian Forests<br/>-Ushas Deva, Ratri Deva, Surya Deva; Three Deva Superteam; Delhi, India<br/>-Twilight Priestess; Solo Heroine; Rural New New Mexico<br/>-Night Owl III; Night Owl Legacy, Heroic; Location Unknown<br/>-Evelyn Gray; Unknown; Ukraine<br/><br/>"My suspicion about the Moonstone Robbery was that my target was information and equipment for the Black Lotus," a freelance spy and assassin, a notorious villain who had not been in prison during Retirement, but had gone silent. Well, silent-er. "For her to extract Nephilim's children, and... hold them as leverage to get her to wreak havoc to keep CHESS and the Firewall Remnants busy." She frowned, tapping her foot against the floor, "I'm not as sorry about that as I probably should be, Nephilim was probably going to turn me into a grease stain if Ace, Minerva and Arachne hadn't showed up."<br/><br/>"In sum."<br/><br/><strong>ZOHAR CONTROL PROJECT<br/>STATUS: ASSEMBLING<br/>-Luminary Advisor: Captured<br/>-Bane Guard: Captured<br/>-Not-Mad-Enough Scientist: ??<br/>-Light and Darkness Heroes: Targeted<br/>-Nephilim Diversion: Inactive</strong><br/>--Thwarting Nephilim Diversion means CHESS and Firewall Remnant resources can be recruited!