The trip back to Kanina's ship was surprisingly devoid of people! Or perhaps not surprisingly; it seemed everyone had either run away, been evacuated or was being mind-controlled by Ace. (Except for the hotel receptionist, maybe he didn't have any sick days left?)<br/><br/>"Whuh. Okay," Auxilia shook her head. Coordination! That was what she was good at! The Auxie-drone set up in the ship, monitoring transmissions and tapping into secured communications as necessary. She was still<em>way</em>too blissed-out to give real-time coordination, but intelligence-gathering was a lot more sedate. One particular feed made her eyes go wide.<br/><br/>"This is your robo-mission-control," she said over the radio, "hello you beautiful people! Have I told you how good I'm feeling right now? Because<em>damn</em>. Okay. So. It looks like I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that there's help showing up. It looks like CHESS has dispatched a psy-resistant hero to deal with the mind controller running amok, I guess the locals were taking their time in responding because they weren't supposed to give this 'Atlantia' character more fodder for her army, and they wanted to make sure they had all their ducks in a row? The bad news is that right now that hero is going to be spotting for a precision bombardment to deal with the sea monster and it's, well, a<em>bombardment</em>and for those of you in the audience not familiar, precision doesn't mean what you think it does when you're talking about automatic grenade launchers a mile away. So you really want to not be standing on that sea monster right now. If you can help the hero tie down Atlantia, it looks like they can deploy choppers with riot foam dispensers as soon as she stops flying around so fast, and there are more heroes and first-responders on the way as soon as she's occupied."<br/><br/>So... hooray?<br/><hr/><div class="floatright">(https://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/f/fb/Zhu_Min_Resized.png)</div>"Hello! Never fear, Petal is here!" Falling Petal, Superheroine Botanist, swung from a vine onto one of the broken buildings, giving a pretty good impression of what a sunrise would sound like if it could talk. Plants sprouted from the concrete around her feet as she touched down, and one look assessed the situation. Acting without hesitation, the heroine plucked exactly one arrow from her quiver and shot it in a high arc at the kraken. It stuck into the monster's flesh next to Whitney and immediately started emitting a thick smoke (and smelled really, amazingly good for some reason? Maybe Petal hadn't taken dog olfactory senses into account when designing it).<br/><br/>Bess unleashed a torrent of yellow healing energy from her staff to stabilize the kraken while Tabs was busy doing open-heart surgery. What was amazing was that the staff's beam even started to clean off blood, giving Tabs a clean shot to make the necessary incisions! Darclight's ice, the last in his reserves, kept the kraken from thrashing and wrecking up the tea parties while Tabs was busy cutting up its heart. The love scalpel worked it's magic quickly (the power of love is a curious thing) and she could see the magically-enhanced veins and arteries hooking up to the private little world contained in the soulgem. Magic started to flow outward through the kraken's bloodstream with purple sparkles and she could feel a sentience awaken as it reached the brain. A psychic pulse of incredible proportion lit off like a faraway explosion, and a telepathic voice on a wide band said...<br/><br/><em>"wait, what the fuck?"</em><br/><br/>And that was about the point where the flare stretched into the sky and the distinct<em>boom-boom-boom</em>and flash of distant cannons lit up. With the wail of falling projectiles the bombardment started raining down, raking the kraken's body with explosions and spilling enough blood to make a shonen protagonist proud.<br/><br/><em>"what the fuck oh fuck we out"</em><br/><br/>With a surge of magical energy, the sorceress-kraken winked out of the battlefield, water rushing in to fill the gap left by its body. For a moment, a silence rested.<br/><br/>"That was... super effective!" Petal punched one fist into the air, turning her sights to the supervillainess still standing, "Atlantia! Stand and pay for your crimes!<span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 8pt;">Wait, she has flippers, is that racist?</span>" A net arrow exploded over Ace's head, a hasty shot going too high, but the heroine was already pulling another arrow out of her quiver.<br/><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Mechanics</div><div class="spoiler_body">OKAY. This is chaos. So, 2d12 doom, closing off the scene. Choose your resolution! Here's the rundown:<br/><br/>Hooking up Auxie to a comm suite still gets you intel. Superhero Response! Falling Petal and a Coast Guard Flotilla.<br/><br/>Darclight has frozen up the Kraken pretty good. Ace has not shaken off her Mad Cat Sidekick Complication.<br/><br/>Falling Petal strikes! She unloads an artillery flare on the kraken.<br/><br/>Little known fact, a lot of Coast Guard ships do have cannons, they're not proper Navy though. Coast Guard Floatilla is a 3d8 mob with the Area Attack special. They start shooting.<br/><br/>Tabs gets the mage-kraken interface going when the bombs start landing, mage-kraken predictably wigs out. It teleports away with its newfound magical powers, I will let you all decide whether or not to go with it; thanks to Auxie you have ample warning to get off if you want. Or... on, for whatever reason.<br/><br/>Petal switches target and chases after Ace! Ace is fast as fuck though so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯<br/><br/>Everybody gets 2 XP. Everybody making use of the My Wife is a Teenage Robot Milestone also gets 3XP (if they haven't taken it already) for recruiting a Supervillainess. (Well, two supervillainesses.)</div></div>