On 2025-04-14 14:46, Dave Van Domelen wrote:
"...those are all, well mostly, cool names, but calling out your attack
before you do it might not be the best idea, tactically," Maddie advised
Tetra-Red and Octa-Green. "At least, not if you use the same name every
time. So keep ALL of the names, just use a different one each time."
"Oh," Tetra-Red slowly nodded. "Yeah, that makes more sense."
Dodeca-Yellow snorted. "Or maybe don't call out anything."
"No, some sort of callsign is necessary to coordinate such synergies," >> Hexa-Blue countered. "Many of our opponents have hearing good enough that we
cannot rely on subvocalization during a fight. And it appears that finding >> combinations like the double gem punch that felled Crusher Rick will be
necessary as Bathory continues to raise the stakes with her apparently
newfound powers."
I enjoyed this tactics discussion. I also enjoyed the action scenes, especially the one which implemented the tactics.
[The cover shows Icosa-Pink hovering in the middle of the page
borne aloft by her brightly glowing pink gem, while vaguely
human shadows around the edges of the page try to shield
themselves from the brilliance.]
Dodeca-Yellow snorted. "Or maybe don't call out anything."
"No, some sort of callsign is necessary to coordinate such synergies," Hexa-Blue countered. "Many of our opponents have hearing good enough that we cannot rely on subvocalization during a fight. And it appears that finding combinations like the double gem punch that felled Crusher Rick will be necessary as Bathory continues to raise the stakes with her apparently newfound powers."
"Yeah, no fair, we don't even know what she used to be able to do, now she's doing all kinds of new things like she found a power vending machine or something like that," Icosa-Pink grumbled. "Half the stuff in her file has some sort of weasel words attached, like 'presumed' or 'not demonstrated.'"
Before I was part of the
Hellhound identity, I was part of the Warden's rather limited social circle."
"I had surmised such," Hexa-Blue nodded. "You have said things that would lead one to figure out that particular secret."
No one was quite sure of Blue was being sarcastic.
Outright control may not be something she can do to anyone whose defenses aren't already down, either because they're drugged, drunk, partying to excess in other ways, or willingly letting her in. But she wants everyone to think she's a full controller like Mr. Strings was, it keeps them from getting too close in person. The bad news is that we can be pretty sure anyone who does spend a lot of time around her is totally under her control."
Drake, one of the original STRAFE powered agents, was functionally invulnerable, but not unhurtable...he still felt pain. Nothing short of a neutron bomb in his stomach could actually damage him. Like his teammate Grind, his name had become a classification for one of the more common powersets.
Or our gems might
not be the only artifacts of the Third Heroic Age dug up from the wreckage of old Manhattan...."
"Five color-coded kids, you think they're Otakuza?" Chuck asked as he stowed his blackcel.
"Otakuza mostly go for the Sentai not the Senshi if you catch my drift.
"Look, if we don't pick something soon, they'll give us something off the Boring List," Hand Narvaez gestured with the tablet.
The team was
gathered in the air-conditioned locker room they'd been using all summer. A curtain hung down the middle so they wouldn't have to run AC in a second entire locker room for the girls.
Everyone looked at ATP.
"What? I wasn't even WITH the Molecules when that happened!" he held up
his hands defensively. "Besides, don't you think they're kinda cute? For crocodilians, anyway?"
"Do you WANT our games to get random paraganger attacks?" Hand shouted over the general hubbub of outrage and shock. "Might as well call ourselves the Wardens."
"Well, Wardens isn't on the licensing list..." Gung-Ho pointed out.
Officially, the neighborhood was called Clinton. Unofficially, it had long been known as Hell's Kitchen. Realistically, the second name was a lot more apt, especially since it lay directly between the original territories of Bathory and Cockatrice and had suffered quite a bit back in 2021-2022 before the two women went from enemies to lovers to allies...and their gangs took a while to settle some of their old grudges on the sly.
Even with practice and multiple cameras, Maddie had trouble following the flickering shadows and occasional launch of a human-beast hybrid through a window, not all of which were on the ground floor.
She noted with
satisfaction that the summer's training was paying off, though. Rarely did any Snow Leopard get hit by just one Morning Star, as they kept double- and triple-teaming opponents to make sure they stayed down. They gave Inky-Doo as wide a berth as they could, whittling down his support troops while denying him any easy hits.
He extended a hand and thin tendrils started to peel away from Tetra-Red's sheath of darkness!
Maddie felt a coldness in her chest, where the pectoral had fused itself
to her. Somehow, she knew she could *push* against the cold, and she did so with a grunt. It felt like trying to push something at a right angle to everything, if that even made sense. Still, it didn't have to make sense to work, as anyone in the supers scene knew.
The tendrils snapped back onto Red's body and Inky-Doo recoiled.
"I...think I can block him," Maddie said over the link. "You can stop holding back!"
"No neko-netoraROW!" she jerked to one side as a bullet struck the back of her shoulder and partly spun her around.
"BINARY STAR PUNCH!" the two shouted as they struck Inky in unison, their gems flaring brightly enough to dismiss the darkness for one blinding moment.
"I got the shooter, you're WELCOME," Dodeca-Yellow snarled from a fifth story window.
"Guys...I think I need to...do something," Icosa-Pink stepped hesitantly
towards Inky, her heart gem glowing more brightly.
While Inky-Doo struggled, Icosa-Pink placed one hand over her gem and reached the other out towards the shadow thief. "Inky-Doo," she started tentatively, as if she was hearing a voice none of the others could, a voice telling her what to do. "KNOW YOURSELF!"
"It...it felt right? There was a shadow over his heart...not the literal one, the kind I felt on Crusher Rick, but I don't get from Bathory's usual catboys and birdgirls," Pink lowered her hand sheepishly.
Hexa-Blue pondered, then loosened her grip. "As a tentative hypothesis,
I would say that the theory that Bathory has found a way to further enhance her followers beyond her usual hybridization ability, is the likely correct one. Whatever that method is, not only does it seem to have some affinity for our collective shadow powers as demonstrated by how Inky-Doo was previously able to steal our shadows, Icosa-Pink's unique powers may serve to both identify and reverse the effect."
"FUCK YOU!" Inky shouted, then started sobbing. "I can't go back to my goddess like this, just another useless stray...."
"He seems more lucid, for better or worse," Hexa-Blue added. "It may be
that Bathory's new source of power has an effect on her subjects' sanity, which might explain why Killgamesh was...like that."
"Maybe the Boys'll kill me," Inky muttered dejectedly. "You told me to know myself? I know I'm trash, and now I'm not even useful trash...."
Now that Bathory is in imminent danger of coming to the forefront of the
story, I realized that there'd been a lot of vague sorta-retcons around her in the years since Matt Rossi III created her.
Okay, I finally unveiled the Special Power I had planned for Icosa-Pink from the initial outline stage, back before I wrote a single issue. It's a not-too-uncommon trope in team books for the seemingly weakest member, or even a mascot, to have some sort of plot-device-level power that could either solve a logistical problem or was key to defeating the Big Bad, or both.
So I shamelessly stole the "Forgive" ability from
GaoGaiGar, since de-Zondarizing monsters fit in well with "how do we deal with whatever Bathory's doing to make super-goons?" But where "Forgive" left the subject better than Zondar had found them, we see that Know Yourself may hurt in non-physical ways.
Black Opal's new special power, though, was more off-the-cuff, I originally had the girls just able to resist Inky's shadow-stealing now that they were more stable, but decided while editing the last scene (I do not recommend writing a fight scene while watching TV, the first draft was awful) that it would give her more of a presence in the fight despite being back at base.
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