1731/Heavy Metallo

Heavy Metallo
Date of Scene:	30 July 2017
Location:	Manhattan
Synopsis:	Power Girl & Grace Choi meet over a fight with Metallo.
Cast of Characters:	Grace Choi, Power Girl

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Grace Choi has posed:
    John Corben had once been a man. Once. Little was left the human, or humanity. But there was one thing he was certain of, and that was that he wanted to destroy not just Superman, anymore. But all Kryptonians. Afterall, he had the ability to do this. He'd come to take a few new electronic components for himself to improve on his weaponizations and augment his strength, and had started by ripping through the steel framework of the building with impunity. He didn't need to use doors, afterall. And he wasn't here for a visit.
    Power Girl had moved to intercept, and found that Metallo already packed quite a punch, and able to take a few punches of her own, him only staggering back a few paces, and punching her again, hard, ruthless. "Another one of you," he snarls, with an almost superior smugness, as if he had something up his sleeve. Which - he does. "I -was- going to start with Superman. But, you'll do. Send a message to him," the cyborg sneers.

    Meanwhile, Grace Choi, is pulling up into the parking lot of the same building on her motorcycle. She'd arranged to meet a friend here, pick her up after work and they'd go drinking around town together. Only, with the ongoing fight, most people have scattered, save a small crowd on the outskirts, snapping photos and footage with their phone. Grace is pushing past them, heading into the fight, having not seen her friend in the crowd. "Dammit. Every single time," she mutters under her breath.

Power Girl has posed:
    "You'll never get to Superman," Power Girl growls. Her lip is swelling. Interesting: it's only done that once before. Her left foot slides back, heel off the ground, really telegraphing that she's about to launch herself at Metallo; but the telegraph counts for a lot less when the attack comes at just under the speed of sound. Both fists are extended forward like a battering ram and catch Metallo in the gut with a sound like artillery shells striking a bomb shelter. The cyborg is hurled back forty feet down the street, hitting butt-first and rolling back another fifteen before stopping. Power Girl just lifts herself three feet into the air and glares down at Metallo. "That hit was payback. Next time I have to hit you, I'm going to rip off your arms and legs just to make sure you can't move, cyborg. So what's your play?"

Grace Choi has posed:
    Metallo rolls, tumbles, and lands about a hundred feet from where Grace is, now, even as Power Girl pushes herself off the ground. He begins to snicker, low, and menacing. "You think you're as good as Superman? You're not even -close-." Perhaps, impossibly, the cyborg rises back up to his feet, as if he'd never been hurt at all. "My play? You want to know what my play is? To eradicate all of you off this planet. Like this."
    The chest cavity of the man opens to reveal a green, glowing stone that begins to radiate poison to certain genetic lifeforms. Namely, Kryptonians.

    The Amazon begins to head over, running towards the chaos, but presuming that Power Girl has this all well in hand. She is, afterall, Power Girl. Grace? Grace is just Grace. At least, in her head.

Power Girl has posed:
    Power Girl has just enough time to curse herself for not thinking to wonder why Metallo's body was made X-ray opaque before, even from sixty feet back, the green K hits her. Her flight falters and she drops to the ground; her vision and hearing narrow to human ranges that, for her, are like going deaf and blind; even her IQ starts to drop from the toxic radiation. To say she has a weakness to it is to completely miss the sick, rotten horror of feeling the life burned from her veins by that green glare.
    But Power Girl doesn't quit. At this range, the K is still lethal, but she has some time to work with: her strength isn't gone yet. "Don't have to be as good as Superman," she strains. "Just better than you!" She ducks behind the nearest car--an Outback, as it turns out--and feels just a hair better for the shielding, even though green K's radiation is such a high frequency it passes between the molecules of a car's metal pretty easily, and musters her strength to seize the SUV by its undercarriage, a task that now takes both hands, and roll it hard down the road toward Metallo. A four-ton bowling ball trying to pick up the last pin.

Grace Choi has posed:
    The SUV slams into Metallo, who also punches it at the same time it hits him to lesson the impact of the blow. The 'soft' metal of the car compared to that which he's made of and the strength involved causes the car to literally crumple, and he bashes it aside, skittering down the road, forcing Grace to put on a burst of speed to the side to avoid it.
    Metallo continues to advance, then, quickly closing the distance between himself, and Power Girl with a burst of his own super-speed, slamming a fist into her gut, relishing in tormenting the female Kryptonian. "Superman isn't even better than me. And you? You aren't half as good as he is." There's absolute hatred in his voice, and, manic delight in the chaos and pain he's raining down on Power Girl.

    Grace, so diverted, meanwhile, had ripped out a street light on her way to the brawl, and, with both arms wrapped around it, she uses it like a javelin, a spear of sorts, to wedge between Metallo's body, lift him up into the air, and toss him thirty or so feet away. The tall, tattooed woman looks pissed, before she looks down at Karen. "Need a hand?"

Power Girl has posed:
    Power Girl's solar reserves aren't near what Superman's are, but she has one advantage he doesn't: training. Where he takes hits gormlessly by taking them in the face and just expecting to stand up to it, she knows how to block and how to roll with a punch. Her palm catches his knuckles (incompletely, due to her sudden loss of speed, but every little bit helps) and her belly softens to avoid the worst of the impact. It's a futile effort: she's already turning green from the Kryptonite.
    Then, Grace Choi.
    "Be... careful," she groans, sweat coursing down her face. "Kryptonite is lethal to everyone, just... slower for you." Her left hand is still numb from that punch, but she's getting up anyway, taking unsteady steps backward down the road. "I have to get back, get my heat vision back. Are you good?"

Grace Choi has posed:
    "Kryptonite? You mean, that green rock in his chest?" Grace eyes the man, getting up fast, and moving towards the two women again clearly not wanting to lose his advantage on Power Girl. And Grace? Well. Grace isn't hitting him as hard as Superman did, or could. Or Power Girl. He's still feeling quite confident, by all estimations.
    "Good until I'm not." Grace knows she's probably overmatched. But, she's also not afraid. And if there's one thing Grace Choi likes? It's a challenge, in a fight, and she turns to fully face the man, charge at him again. And, where he might expect her to javelin him again with the streetlight, she instead throws it at him, like a spear.
    Metallo nimbly dodges it, and Grace goes for the more -- unconvential tactic of doing a dive-tackle straight into Metallo, slamming the notorious, and lethal villian straight into the ground, the impact spider-webbing into the pavement of her strength, and his weight.
    She uses the opportunity to slam a punch into his eye socket, to keep him down while her other hand pushes into that chest cavity to grab the kyrptonite.

Power Girl has posed:
    Metallo isn't a good fighter. He's a punk who lucked into superstrength; a brute who understands tactics about as well as a charging bull does. He's way more out of his league than he thinks he is. He howls more in outrage than pain at being struck in the eye, an undisciplined waste of time that stops him from taking a perfectly good punch to Grace's ribs while she's open, and instead starts bucking like a mechanical bull to get the Amazon off him.
    Meanwhile, Power Girl is still backing away, but slowly, keeping an eye on the fight. The smart tactic would be to run as fast as she can until her powers are back, but Metallo isn't Grace's problem, and Power Girl won't take the chance he'll hurt her. She wants to be ready to dash back in.

Grace Choi has posed:
    Grace knows the fundamentals of Amazon fighting, of wrestling. She is certain she can't win a direct-brawl confrontation with Metallo, but what she can do? Is grab his waist with her legs, roll him to the side and then slip across his back while Metallo is still grabbing for her, trying to brawl, like he does with Superman, while Grace is busy bending over her own back to drive his back, and head, into the pavement to buy Power Girl more time. "Whoever sold you this body," she quips back to Metallo, rolling over after the power-suplex has been given to roll to her feet again to face him, "You got -really- ripped off. Shoddy workmanship all over. You got -several- screws loose, man."

Power Girl has posed:
    The further from Metallo Power Girl gets, the faster she can get away. Yes! She'll be into the air soon: it won't get her as far away as backing up would, but it'll gives her a line of sight to Metallo over Grace's enormous silhouette. Her vision is coming back now, her eyes able to telescope again, to home in on Metallo's joints. Soon the heat vision will follow, but... no, her first task should be the Kryptonite.
    Power Girl can't rely on herself or Grace to shut the portal over Metallo's green power core. She'll have to work cheap for now. She shoves her fingers deep into the asphalt and digs out chunk of asphalt the size of a cantaloupe. It'll do for short measures. Power Girl's feet leave the ground and she shoots a hundred feet up in the air: now, she just has to wait for the giant down there to give her a clear shot.

Grace Choi has posed:
    Grace gets clocked, hard, and is sent crashing into the opposite wall of a building. Power Girl's hearing, slowly returning, can probably make out the sound of several bones cracking, if not breaking. Metallo comments to Grace, "You're even worse. I'm just going to crush your skull, then, I'm going to take out her." He points up at Metalo, and Grace cranes her head up to look. And, an idea forms in her head. Her breathing is labored, but she bum-rushes Metallo again after shaking the cobwebs out of her ringing head.
    Metallo moves to sidestep, counting on her to tackle him again, but this time Grace goes into a leg-slide, her foot connecting into Metallo's causing his body to lean into hers.
    Momentum, power, physics does the rest, shifting his weight into her, and while he's already slamming his elbow into her side she's already pushing him upwards, tossing him into the air.
    Metallo, however briefly, has become a clay pigeon for Power Girl while Grace collapses to the ground, wincing, holding her stomach. Yeah. She's hurting. Probably even has more ribs cracked.

Power Girl has posed:
    Ouch! That sounded like it sucked... but it was probably necessary. Power Girl's strength and speed aren't back yet: putting him in freefall gives her the best shot she's gonna get. Grimly, Power Girl watches Metallo fly, arm cocked, forcing herself to wait for his flight to slow down as it reaches apogee, the moment when he'll be almost still...
    Wait... NOW!
    Power Girl hurls the ball of asphalt at Metallo's chest as hard as she can, aiming right for the chest cavity. The weirdly soft, malleable material hits like a cannonball, knocking him back hard with such force his flight is almost perfectly horizontal for five seconds. Power Girl spends four of those seconds glaring at Metallo's chest, the heat from her eyes melting the asphalt to seal around the Kryptonite like warm putty and searing the surrounding metal of his chest to slag.
    It won't hold, but it's a start. Karen shoots upward into the sky in a parabolic arc so when she hits Mach 1 for her trip back down into Metallo, the sonic boom won't damage the city. She can feel the green K trying to weaken her and succeeding, but during this moment, while he's in the air as a victim of inertia, she grits her teeth and summons all her strength to seize his wrists and yank them behind his back. Her boot heels plant between his shoulder blades and she pulls, waiting to see which arm will wishbone off first: turns out it's the right. She lets the arm drop and takes his left in both hands to rip it from its socket as well.
    Then she lets Metallo fall, because she's already getting nauseated from the radiation still seeping through the asphalt. He will not appreciate the impact, which she makes a little bit worse by blowing hard on his chest to convince the superheated asphalt and metal to freeze in place. Wouldn't want them to still be semi-liquid when he lands. The impact could splash a lot of it out of him.

Grace Choi has posed:
    Grace slowly stands, the fight not out of her yet. And she walks, slowly, but with absolute purpose towards the impact-point where Metallo fell after Power Girl tried to seal off his Kyrptonite cavity. She's tender, hurt, but the fight is far from out of her. And the fact that his arm is ripped off makes him far less dangerous to her.

    "You're both going to die," rambles the once-man, snarling, fury in his human, and his cybernetic eye both - so little of the flesh left on him. He attempts, in a desparte effort, to ramp up the output of the kryptonite shard in his stomach, while also seeking to kick out of Power Girl's grip.

    "You got him?" Grace asks, through a weezing breath, as she approaches.

Power Girl has posed:
    "Not before you go to a landfill after a CO trades you in for the newest Lexphone," Power Girl snaps back at Metallo. "It'll be like the end of Toy Story, except no one will care because you're human garbage."
    Okay, that was harsh, but he DID try to kill her by giving her rapid onset cancer.
    Power Girl wants so badly to flip Metallo onto his belly, but that would give him too much leverage to get up. She's just going to have to deal with the sweats and the feeling of her eyebrows starting to fall out. To Grace, she says, "Quick, start kicking some of the rubble down here. Cover his chest. I'm going to make sure they need excavation tools to take him to prison."

Grace Choi has posed:
    Grace nods, once. The rubble comes, the smaller pieces first, but weight really isn't a porblem for her, and the pieces get larger, and larger, heavier and heavier, until, straining and clearly in pain, Grace appears over the edge with another car. "Let him go in three." There's a pause. "One. Two. Three." And then the car is heaved down with the full force she can muster, as soon as Power Girl leaves. A few larger pieces are then thrown on top of that.
    Nope. No way he is getting out of there, until a security team can disable him effectively, and take him in.
    Grace collapses onto her butt, "Damn," she breathes, hard. "I am not offering to pick friends up from work, anymore."

Power Girl has posed:
    Power Girl takes her Kryponian boot off Metallo's chest on Grace's count and jumps back out of the crater (she THINKS she could have flown, but it's not worth it). From its rim, she gives the garbage in there a hard stare, stone and metal softening and then running red-hot in bands over his chest, muffling the Kryptonite further and sealing him to the ground in the process. Ugh.
    Still not really feeling up to flying, Power Girl walks around to Grace and pops a squat next to her to look her in the eye without forcing Grace to stretch her ribs by looking up. "Good work, soldier," she compliments. "You saved a lot of people today. Including me. Take it easy while I coordinate with the first responders, okay?"
    Power Girl looks like she could stand to take it easy herself, but duty waits for no woman, and she's soon flying around to help direct traffic, warn away pedestrians, and assist police and medical staff to where they need to be.

Grace Choi has posed:
    Grace has proven surprisingly resiliant, for a human. And strong. But, rest is good. And while her regenerative abilities are impressive, they're nothing near instantaneous. So she'll sit for awhile, providing a marker -- as if the SUV melted into the pool along with the rippling asphalt that had been melted and recooled for the excavation and containment team so Metallo can be dug up, and put away in a special cell for 'people' like him.
    Thankfully, to Power Girl's quick intervention, no real injuries from citizens were had beyond some panic attacks, a few bumps, scrapes, and sprains in the running away and crowd pushing.
    And as the scene quiets down, the very large woman is shaking her head to the medical team now seeing to her. "Don't worry about me," she tells the paramedics. "I'll heal in the next day or so. Comes with the territory. Used to it."

Power Girl has posed:
    "You sure you don't need a flight to the hospital?" Power Girl asks solicitously, from behind. Looks like she feels a little responsible for you. "Or to a secret lair with a purple ray emitter, or your underground pool of aquavitae, or whatever?" That's not really a joke. For all she knows, you could have those things.

Grace Choi has posed:
    "Purple what-now's?" Grace looks queerly at Power Girl, then she seems to get it. "Ah. Right. I'm not --," she gestures, "Not hero. I'm a bouncer. Was here to pick up a friend, got worried about her. Paramedics told me she's alright, though. Nah, I've had worse than this before. Few broken ribs, little internal bleeding? Painful, but bearable. Been awhile since I got hit that hard." Oddly, Grace almost seems impressed, as much as annoyed. As if she might've even enoyed it, on some level. But, her heart is calm, relaxed. And Power Girl's abilities may even be able to tell, depending on how close she's looking at (or into) Grace couple with super-hearing that her body is on the fast-track to self-repair. "
    The Amazon offers her hand, and a smile. "Grace Choi. Pleased to meet you."

Power Girl has posed:
    "I don't know, it's some kind of healing ray. I heard Wonder Woman talk about them once." Power Girl waves it off--literally, she flips her wrist--as irrelevant. "You are a hero, though," she continues seriously. "It's not a job you fill out a W-2 for, it's a result of your choices. You put yourself in danger to help people less capable than you. That's a hero, Grace."
    Power Girl takes the offered hand and shakes it. Hero to hero.

Grace Choi has posed:
    "Just don't go trying to talk me into putting on some costume, or taking up some crazy name." She looks up, and a grin slashes, lopsided, across her features as she raises a hand up to run through her hair to get some of the debris out of it. "I like who I am, just fine. Nice to meet you, though. I'm just a woman who likes a good fight, likes keeping the peace, and, likes her booze, and I make enough money to keep me satisfied at bouncing. Chaney's pays me well. You should drop by, sometime. Bar for folk like us. Metas. Or, in your case, aliens." But she says that in a good natured tone. "Not many places around where people can really go that others would call freaks, you know?"

Power Girl has posed:
    That gives Power Girl pause. She's never felt like a freak, and the only people who've called her one are people who need a good punching anyway, but do other people feel differently? Is this one of those safe spaces/intersectionality things she's heard about but doesn't really understand?
    She's drifting. Yikes! Must be the green K fuzzing up her head. Power Girl shakes her head briskly. "Uh, sure, sounds nice, I guess," she answers.

Grace Choi has posed:
    "Drinks on me, if you ever want to," Grace promises the the blonde sitting with her. Her hand drops to her side, palm placed onto the ground for support as she favors her left side a little more than her right. "So, this normal for you?" She gestures, casually, towards the mess left in the fight's wake and to also indicate the insantiy of Metallo. "I'm used to more people who don't pay their bar tab. Though," she frowns, shaking her head, "Recently tagged onto a mercenary team with Zinda Blake. Crazy, amazing woman. Had a hell of a time in South America. Freaking hate magic."

Power Girl has posed:
    Power Girl nods. "Pretty normal. Took a lot longer than usual, though. More property damage." She looks around suddenly, suspiciously, for anyone who looks like a process server, but--nope, no problems so far. Okay. Good. She returns her attention to Grace and says, "I won't ask what the job was, since I don't need to know what foreign nationals are doing in South America. You sure you don't want your ribs looked at?"

Grace Choi has posed:
    The red-haired Amazon smiles again, shaking her head, "Been burned alive before. Fought a veritable God, took an explosion in the face and shoulder. Damn, that hurt. This isn't anything. Two days, maybe three, it'll be like it never happened. Until then, some dark ale will tide me over well enough." Slowly, Grace rises to her feet, "Damn good fight, though. Glad you were here. No way in hell I could've taken him myself, I don't think." And, by her expression, that's tough for her to admit. When you're strong as Grace, there's not a lot of opponents that really will give you a challenge -- or pose a threat.
    She nods, "Thanks, Power Girl. Don't forget the offer." Then, Grace is heading back towards her motorcycle. Been a hell of a day.