Tectonic smirks at slugs Wingblade lightly in the arm, with enough force to probably shatter a normal human's shoulder, but is nothing for the two supers. "Yeah, yeah, laugh it up," she chuckles. "Some young kid with high-end 'shifting powers showed up in India. Scared the cops, scared him, he shifted, which scared the cops, and it ended escalating into this whole thing. We calmed him down, but he's still somewhere out there."
"And come on, girl! You have to agree that the duo Tubthumping we sang was great."
"Nah, it isn't money. I mean, it might be, since I think it's worth more than what's currently in my pocket. Heh." Tectonic stares up at the starry night sky and gives a heavy sigh. "You know that scrap with the idiot wannabe we had a bit ago? I, um, well, I went a bit too deep with my powers. Brought a bunch of bad memories back. That plus the fight kinda made me pissed the f%~+ off. When I went home River was right on my ass about the fight, saying I endangered too many people. She might've been right. I dunno. But I just kinda snapped. Went ranting and stormed off to my room." Tectonic chuckles, although there's no humor in it. "Real mature, I know. Things have been tense since then. No, scratch that. Things have been super s@&@ty since then."
Tectonic shakes her head. "Nah. Kinda the opposite, really. She was born, well, um... she can't move her legs, so Barney and Jill threw her out when she was born. River actually was the one to track down the lab in the first place, though. Pretty much adopted me. She's cool, but... it's been a bit rough lately." Tectonic sighs.
Surprisingly, Tectonic is leading Wingblade to one of the nicer parts of town. It's artsy, almost homely really. She stops and pats her jacket pockets as if to check something's still there, then breathes a sigh of relief.
Tectonic palms her forehead. "Oh, right. You don't have a big sister who goes and forces you to partake in human culture. Well... heh. I'll explain when we get there. And it's not a martial art. Shall we?"
Tectonic shrugs. "Kinda have a place in mind. Don't know if you'll be interested, though. Ever karaoke'd before?" Her eyes widen. "It's, it's not a bar! I'm not that much of a delinquent."
Tectonic, for her part, crumples up the shredded manacles into a tight metal ball, growling. She snorts at Wingblade's initial speech, but her face softens slightly once her teammate confides in her. "Look, Wingblade..." Tectonic sighs, rubbing the back of her head. "I can't really say I'm sorry about what happened. You were way out of line. But... I was too. I was kinda scared, really. I just got my ass beat by that alien lady, and I saw a bunch of weird, f~&!ed up s#$+ I don't really understand." Tectonic laughs harshly. "S&%@, I'm still scared by it. I was built to be a soldier, not some weird, spiritual thing that thousands of people are apparently arguing over. I... I wasn't really in the best emotional state to begin with when I figured out what you said. So I guess this is a weird, roundabout way of saying that, yeah. I am sorry. And, as far as all of this b+@@!**~ goes, you're a good teammate. We keep each other in check, I think." Tectonic shakes her head and smiles. "Ugh. F@&*ing Christ. After all of that stuff, I really could use a night out if we have the time. I think you need to loosen up a bit too. Wanna come with?"
Admitting vulnerability and weakness and marking Wingblade as my current Love, replacing Atoms. No Rival currently. Wingblade now has Influence over Tectonic, and I hold 2 to help Wingblade as if it's Team in the pool.
"Not yet. But you can be," Tectonic says gruffly. "You have any ties to this place, kid? I'm pretty certain that we can wrangle somebody to properly train you back in Halcyon City if you're interested. And, believe me, with powers like that, people will be really fu-freaking interested."
Tectonic throws back her head and laughs. "'But I'm the good guy! I'm doing what's right!' Do you have any idea how many crazy villains use the same justification for what they do?" She shakes her head. "If you're endangering the people you're supposed to protect, you're not a hero. You're a danger."
Tectonic raises an eyebrow. "Yeah. And why, exactly, were you provoking the police to shoot into the crowd in the first place? They're people too, and people get scared, especially of hulking, super-strong supers with a flair for the dramatic. Have you considered that your presence is the very reason why they need a hero? I'm normally one for duking it out, but save your strength for real threats, not for a bunch of people who are scared about what you might do to the citizenry."
Tectonic dusts herself off and gives a dubious look at the super. "Gee. You really like showing off, don't you?" she says, although her smirk indicates that she is at least somewhat impressed. "Alright, assuming you speak English: I'm Tectonic, she's Wingblade. We were sent here to bring in a dangerous super disrupting the area..." she looks him up and down, "...but it looks like Matrix didn't give us the full rundown. So, if you please: what the f+~! is happening here?"
With barely a second's warning, Tectonic is awkwardly yanked forward with Wingblade's sudden movement, and Shayera's wings cut deep into Nora's armor, although they don't quite pierce the skin. "Watch what you're doing with that!" she snaps at her, before offhandedly wrenching chunks of concrete out of the ground, then sending them rocketing towards the remaining cops' hands, attempting to encase them in rock.
Tectonic is pulled into the fray alongside Wingblade, her earthen shield automatically forming. As Wingblade deflects the bullets with her wings, the young woman grits her teeth and automatically adopts an unfamiliar stance, and wrenches a stone wall out of the ground to cover the areas Wingblade can't protect.
Defend:2d6 - 1 ⇒ (5, 4) - 1 = 8
Clearing Guilty and escalating the situation.
The creation of the wall, however, creates a small quake, knocking the officers back and even causing some of them to fall.
"Me neither. Dragon dragged me to the tower to force me to catch up on culture. None of it really made sense, but this s&!% always came up, for whatever reason. If Matrix had a sense of humor, though, I doubt that it would extend to forcing us to work together."
Tectonic sputters, then looks at the handcuffs and grumbles. "Fine. Seriously, what's the deal with the 'cuffs? Like they ripped this idea from one of those b#*&&+~! movies."
Tectonic stares at the scene, growls, the starts yelling at the sky. "HEY! MATRIX! ASSHAT! I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME! COULD YOU HAVE AT LEAST GIVEN US A LITTLE MORE INFORMATION GOING IN?!" She then turns to Wingblade and sighs. "Fuuuuck. Give me a reason for why I shouldn't jump in and help the guy in about five seconds. Feels like we've got a Robin Hood-y sitch here."
Tectonic snorts. "Completely new, trust me. I'm not even sure how it works. Some old lady showed up in my head, gave me tea that might have actually been coffee, gave me a few cryptic hints, then thumped me in the head and gave me a live demonstration of... well, whatever new, weird s!+@ my powers are going to start doing, I guess. Gave me a tripped out vision of what happened while I was out. I saw Hashtag sleeping in his room while a bunch of blobby shadow monster-things drank from a bunch of saltwater he was leaking inside of an iron vault sitting atop a junk heap. Pretty metaphorical, but I got the gist of things. And I saw a bunch of people in robes, including the old lady, arguing about... me, I think? A bunch of other people, and aliens, I think, started getting kinda pissed and said that if the people in the robes didn't f%+~ up, they wouldn't have existed. Didn't catch everything, but eventually some chick in black armor with a weird-looking gun grabbed the old lady, said that they'd help out, and just vanished. No idea if it's going to happen again, though, or even if it'll happen again."
Tectonic snorts. "Sightseeing? Really? I'd be more worried about, say, figuring out who this idiot we're supposed to hunt down is so we can get... this off as soon as possible."
Tectonic, for her part, wasn't too perturbed to find that she was literally tied to Wingblade, at least at first. That's probably because she was retching into the gutter for the better part of five minutes. "Once? Once a day is fine. But twice is going a bit overboard, don't you..." As she wipes away the last of the bile from her mouth, Tectonic finally notices who she's been stranded with. "You have got to be kidding me," she says, deadpan.
Tectonic just stands, dumbstruck, as the team implodes around her. She opens her mouth, makes a few vague, uncertain gestures, as everybody takes off, then she sighs and hangs her head. "As I said before," she says, resigned. "Find somebody else. We're not ready for this. Doubt we ever could be, really, if we're all ready to go at each other's throats every time one of us sets somebody else off." She then turns back to the corridor that they entered through and leaves.
Tectonic raises an eyebrow. "You have a point. The thing is, though, we don't know that they're brainwashed. And the ideal solution isn't to fight the Givers, it's to eliminate whatever the hell that they're fighting over there. And, as you said, we have the added bonus of having however many kids who are actually in a good mindset to fight out of that hundred to go up against the threat that the Givers are fighting."
Tectonic pipes up. "This is a chronic problem, not an immediate one. Sounds like things are getting worse over there, but, not to sound callous, they can probably hold off whatever threat that they're facing for a few more weeks. I'd rather go in as a team than a bunch of confused and angry teenagers who are still pissed at each other."
Tectonic clearly wants you to be the leader of the team. To take charge, to name them, to keep them all together. Despite her bravado, Tectonic's terrified of losing the team, as it's almost the only thing she has left. And she thinks that Atoms is the only one who has a clear enough head to do that.
Tectonic shrugs. "Well, I..." She pauses for a moment, looking out of the corner of her eye at... something. "Martial arts... martial arts would be good."
Tectonic clears her throat. "Hate to be the one stating the obvious here, but we're barely a step above your average villain in the public eye here." Tectonic begins ticking off all of the team's blunders with her fingers. "First of all, right when the team formed, we accidentally wrecked a legitimate research station working on a cure to leukemia or something above the nefarious base that was making super-soldiers. More recently, we got into a tussle with Haxor, and for whatever reason people are blaming the flying cars on us. And no more than an hour ago I destroyed a school trying to stop the Givers, and we failed in that mission. Is there... well, there has to be some other junior team that can take care of all this s$*$ while you're gone. Right? I mean, if we f$!% up one more time, we're all going to get tossed in supermax. And we're all teenagers. We are guaranteed to f%@+ up at some point."
Tectonic doesn't seem too perturbed by the scorn of the heroes, but shrugs at Nick's smug snark. "Drama all aside, why are we here in particular again? Do you guys have some sort of weird interdimensional treaty with some kind of cosmic overlord that you can't go interfering with other dimensions and you need us to take care of this problem, or some other kind of BS?"
Tectonic snorts and says offhandedly. "Please, Hashtag. If I thought that Wingblade really had the cojones to kick you off the team, I would be kicking her ass six ways from Sunday rather than having a pleasant conversation about alien abductions with her. Trust me, it was all idiotic posturing."
Tectonic furrows her brow. "I think the more poignant question here is why they haven't asked you guys for help. This is your schtick, right? Saving other dimensions, promoting peace on Earth, all of that s@%+, right? If they have enough information to come here and roughly speak our language, either through some weird mind-thingy or information gathering, why haven't they asked you guys to end the threat permanently, and stop having to deal with upstart heroes every time they need to grab a few more conscripts?"
At Eldritch's speech, Tectonic nods and steps forward. "To summarize, we all got f#@+ed up hard by that fight, but we need to kick all of our baggage to the side of the road. We can punch the s*## out of and scream at each other all we want after this is done. I just really hope that I won't need to kick your heads out of your asses so that we can be a team again."
"So, um, some lady appeared in my head while I was KO'd and was giving me that stereotypical, weird mystical BS, and then showed me all of the stuff that happened while I was out. I saw everything," Tectonic grimaces, but continues. "It was all really weird. Everything that was real was grey, and I could hear what everyone was thinking a lot louder than what everyone was saying. And... and there was this other, weird metal forest that kind of... overlapped with everything else." Tectonic sighs and rubs the back of her head. "Wingblade... she was really falling apart back there. You don't even know. Vick nearly got killed. He just needed some time alone, and Wingblade... she just completely lost it after he told her to f@&~ off and leave him alone while he was trying to stabilize after he nearly got cut in half. With... a swordfish, I think? You heard the rest."
Tectonic, while still simmering with somewhat counterproductive rage, walks somewhat stiffly into the main room. She quirks an eyebrow at the appearance of Vick's mother, but keeps silent.
"And that's where you wrong," Tectonic's voice is gentler now, but still cold as ice. "The last thing I saw before I woke up was Vick doing the last thing he wanted to do to help her: talk to his mom." Tectonic fights her way past her anger, past Wingblade's stupidity, to tell the truth. "Thing is, Wingblade, just because you're a leader, doesn't mean you have to take the blame for everyone's mistakes. You help them realize who stupid they were, and how to get past their stupidity and hopefully learn from it. But you can't yell at your teammates until they stop being stupid. That only makes them angry and idiotic. If you're going to be the leader of this little band here, you need to learn how to guide us, not to order us."
Tectonic says, equally quietly, "You threatened to kick him out of the team. That's the worst. I don't care that he said you could keep the headset, it's not about that. We all need.... this. Vick especially. He's too proud to admit it, but he does. He's trying to help that girl, believe it or not, last time I saw him. That's how much the team means to him. He's going to do this, even though he isn't ready. But you can't force him to make that decision."
Tectonic barks out a short, bitter laugh. "Unless Hashtag has a bag of magic pixie dust that's been giving my brain all of these weird-ass visions, then he's at no fault for giving me the truth. He said, and I quote, that if you threatened him again he'd port you into space. You have no idea what he went through. And I can quote the rest of the conversation verbatim right here, right now, if you want me to."
Tectonic nods. "Okay." she then reaches for her communicator, pauses, then says, "Passing out suddenly or starting to freak out at random things may become a regular thing."
Unleash my (new) Powers:2d6 ⇒ (3, 5) = 8
Tectonic is trying to make sense of the weird visions she got during the dream. Marking Angry.
Although her view of what had happened in her absence was somewhat... distorted, by the sheer primalness of it, it was still understandable, if only barely. And what the young woman saw pissed her off.
"And, Atoms," she says, "Be glad that you're not on the receiving end of what I'm about to give to Wingblade," before finally opening up her communicator.
She starts out simply. "You b%##*," she snarls. "How f%~~ing dare you! You have no idea what Vick was going through, and you have the bravado to make it out as if he's the bad guy when you try to bully and mock him into going on a dangerous mission while he's clearly not ready? And then to flat out lie to the rest of the team that he threatened you? I don't care who taught you, if you start melting down the moment something goes wrong, you are not qualified to lead!"
Changing Atoms to Tectonic's Love and Wingblade to Tectonic's rival.
"Did you and Wingblade have a massive argument? About whether you would take the fall for... what happened. Thanks, um, thanks for offering by the way. I'm... I'm checking if what I just saw is real." Nora seems... troubled. Distant.
Tectonic's eyes snap open, but rather than immediately panicking as Atoms would expect from her background, she seems almost... calm. "Atoms," she says quietly, "did you and Wingblade have a huge blowout argument?"
"Well, you have questions, no doubt," the woman said as she casually sipped her tea. She was dressed simply, in worn grey robes, and her grey hair was done up in a simple bun. "Such as, 'What's going on? Who the hell are you? Where am I?' etc., etc. I will do my best to answer, but this is a rather... unusual circumstance."
Tectonic looked down at the teacup in her hands, then slowly put it down on the surface of the blank void as if it was to explode at any moment. "Um..."
The woman gave a kindly, crinkled smile. "You don't drink tea. I thought as much. I believe black coffee will be more to your taste." The alluring scent of caffeinated bliss wafted up to Tectonic's nostrils from the cup. Cautiously, Tectonic took a sip from the teacup, which was in her hands again. The coffee was fantastic.
"Now, on to your questions. We don't know what rightfully happened. You shouldn't even be on this world." Tectonic stared at the woman incredulously, eyebrow raised.
"Last I checked, I'm human. Well, relatively. Other than geokineticism, and the ability to violate conservation of mass," Tectonic said somewhat sardonically, taking another sip from the coffee mug.
"Well, you're definitely native. That's for sure. But you, and by extension we, aren't." Tectonic opened her mouth as if to ask another question, but the room shook violently. The coffee mug shattered on the floor, then was in her hands again.
"It seems as if we don't have much time left. You're in an in-between space. A bridge between-" another tremor drowned out her last word. "And my name is Korra. And, well, my dear, you need to wake up." With those last words, she flicked Tectonic on the forehead. Knowledge flooded into her, and she saw the world, what happened to her teammates, but through a different lens, and wisdom and serenity and-
The one situation where rolling high is bad... sigh...
Despite her best attempts to steel herself against the barrage, Tectonic flies backward hitting a wall. She had thought the fight over. She had thought it was done. She had thought it was okay to let down her shield.
Blood spatters a pillar as she slumps to the ground. Tectonic's still breathing, if barely.
I'll chose to reassure Atoms and take away Alloy's ability to fight.
Tectonic scowls. "If you can still cry, you're human. If you can still laugh, you're human. If you're having an existential crisis, you're human, no matter if you're made of pure... whatever it is you're made out of or if you have metal wings."
Tectonic manages to keep her feet in the wake of the massive burst of energy that Atoms unleashes, if only because she literally rooted her feet to the ground. She ignores Wingblade's orders and walks up to Atoms, dropping the tough-girl act for a moment. "Hey, man, you okay?" she asks, genuine concern in her voice. With her left hand, she casually lifts a block of rock and launches it at Alloy.
