Owner	Pose
Clea	--Once, there was a maiden who was born.--     With as much time as Clea has been spending in the astronomy lab, she sometimes sourly thinks she should change her major to astronomy and just be done with it. It's been necessary this week, though. She's been monitoring the signs for several days now--the trickles from Jupiter, the violet flashes from Saturn--and Clea is more than competent at reading the universe's semaphore messages: someone (probably a boy, probably under the age of twelve) had a dream about a vast, broken city under a black sun next to a black lake. That dream was potent, and it rippled across reality all the way to the borders beyond the stars, where malevolent things sleep. In a vast, cosmic sewer, where dirty gravity is flushed down into unspeakable oceans, a fungus larger than worlds twitched in its sleep, and psychic resonance began to poison the boy's mind, feeding on its energy to make the dreams real...     One exorcism later, the boy was fine, but the damage was done. A link to the real world had been forged, and this fungus, alive and aware, began to spread into Queens ... into the sewers, naturally. Already it was spreading and growing, feeding on New York's accumulated filth and on the energy of nightmares generated by one of the world's largest, angriest cities.     All of which is a long way to say there's a reason a section of the Hudson River has gone black and still as a Great Old One spreads across the water like the algae it so nearly is, forming up into thick, ropy, amorphous tentacles up to twenty feet long at times, and growing ever longer.     The Starseed has sprouted, and Clea is flying as fast as she can, dodging not only its tentacles but the waves of horror that trail behind it like physical things, like afterimages, assaulting the mind. Half-circles of ochre light extend from her hands, a bit like war fans, maybe, cutting through the unutterable plant grown where she can...
Karolina	It's that ochre light that draws Karolina. She had been out shopping, building up her Earth-appropriate wardrobe when she noticed a flyer in the distance and decided to come investigate. A creature of radiant rainbow iridescence swooping from among the buildings to join Clea. The tentacles don't take much to spot, for all that the Majesdanian is non-magical. She endeavors to buy Clea at least some space by letting loose with an energy projectile formed of cosmic energy, trying to tamp down on her horror at the things clawing at her mind.     "Looks like you might need some help!" she calls out in the direction of Clea, flittering out of the way of one of the tentacles before adding,"What /is/ that?"
Clea	--She told her mom, "I know how I'm gonna die."--     Damn. A mortal. A superbeing, but still a mortal.     Well, the Rule of Shade has been in effect since Clea began the fight early this evening; her true appearance is concealed by the Images of Ikonn, cloaking her in the appearance of a Caucasian woman wearing a purple and pink leotard with odd images stitched into the fabric, and whose bangs curl up from her forehead like ram's horns. It's not much, but it's a start. Her mind is racing on how to deal with the flying human's presence--how much information can she safely give?--but that concern splits Clea's concentration too much for a fight, and a sweeping, raking tentacle slams into her ribs, sending her spinning like an American football through the air to land hard on a nearby gravel beach. Clea barely has time to summon the Shield of the Seraphim before she's rolling over broken bottles, dirty diapers, used syringes, and worse: the golden light of her spell protects her skin, but still rattles her around in the protective aura like a mouse in its exercise ball. Clea paws feebly at the earth, vertigo taking her, trying to figure out which way is up so she can stand up...     Shakily, Clea rises to her feet, hips bent and hands low in case she falls forward again. The beach is slowly stopping its spin in her dazed eyes.     Unsurprisingly, the metahuman's question goes unanswered for a few seconds.
Karolina	"Hey!" Karolina doesn't have the time to react to Clea's sudden spinning flight, for all that the rainbow creature blazes brighter, redirecting light to fire a blast in the direction of the creature and swooping off with the intention of sweeping Clea out of the way of a follow-up strike. Actually grabbing Clea's completely unnecessary versus the shimmering waves of energy that buoy the ignorant mortal,"Where's your team? Don't you have a team?!" she can't help but blurt with the blind ignorance of the young in her assumptions,"Augh... that thing is super ugly. I can distract it, but I'm not sure how much of an affect I'm having."
Clea	--"It's gonna hurt bad,"--     "Urgh," is Clea's first comment; intelligent and witty she is, oh yes, but her broccoli and rice lunch is staying inside her rather than coming up for air, so that's something. Clea shakes her head hard to clear it, and explains a bit woozily, "No team. That's an alien fungus. Psychic, shapeshifter. Grows eating the filth in the river. Your light ... fungi don't like light, right?" The last question is a bit uncertain--Ecology 101 is not coming quickly to Clea's rattled brain--but it feels right.     It shouldn't be taking this long to get her wits back, why is she still so groggy--     Oh. Oh, no. The Old One is feeding off her mind. Of course it is.     Clea looks out into the river, and in the few seconds this conversation has been going on, the Starseed has easily tripled in size, and the shapes it can take have become more complex, not to mention grotesque. A full sixty feet of wet, sloppy, green-black mass shot through with pulsating, oozing tendrils of yellow rises from the Hudson like a snake, a snake topped by an obscene mockery of a human form, its arms ten feet long and bulging misshapenly around its too many joints; its face is all eyes and mouth from which a grasping, prehensile beard of algae slops and oozes. It's reaching for the two heroes, and dead fish--clearly dead--are flapping their way blindly down its arms toward the heroes, their bodies shot through with virulent thrush that seems to be animating them as zombies. Ineffectual zombies, but zombies all the same.
Karolina	"Okay... well, I'm not going to drop you... just... trust me, okay?" Karolina offers for Clea as she turns her attention back towards the monster,"Grrroooossss." is her opinion on it. Solar powered, indeed, but not quite in the same way as someone like Superman. The rainbow shimmer of cosmic energy brightens as she directs her attention back towards the rapidly expanding grotesquerie, aiming blasts at the searching tentacles as she shifts their position further away.     "Oh my god that thing is..." ugly, too ugly. She doesn't know what's happening with Clea but she does endeavor to sweep down lower in what she hopes might be a better position for the other woman to utilize her own power even as she brings her own to bear with all the determination she can muster. It might have been a good long while, but it's like riding a bike.
Clea	--"and I ain't coming back."--     Blurrily, Clea intones, "Not my mind, monster ... by the Mists of Munnopor, you won't have my mind!" Clea's hands extend out, fingers twisted into weird, inhuman gestures, and a blue cloud begins to blow forth from her hands along an intangible wind at her back, multiplying the cloud's volume and sending it arcing upward to the Starseed's "face." Its head is engulfed in that glowing mist, a mist composed of magical energy that crackles like static electricity with the quantum possibilities from dimensions far above our own, forming an effective dampener around its ever-feeding psychic aura.     Clea's mind begins to clear, finally. Praise the Vishanti for small favors.     "Good! You're doing well," Clea says encouragingly, and pulls herself out of the other woman's aura as best she can, taking flight under her own power again. She glances at the sizzling Starseed and declares, "You're doing well against it, let me take care of the fish real quick!" Yes, the fish are harmless, flopping spastically on the ground; but their bodies leave patches of mold behind, mold that could spread and sprout into something unbearable. Clea summons the Bolts of Bedevilment at full strength and takes aim, firing strangely curving bolts of purple energy at each poor, undead fish, incinerating it on the spot. It's not hard work, but it's taking time, there are so many of them...
Karolina	Karolina shrinks her aura down as Clea leaves it, alighting on one of the closer buildings given the way the Starseed is expanding the power imbalance even in daylight's going to be draining. With the familiarity of one who's worked in a team before she doesn't second-guess Clea's move in favor of bringing that radiant power to bear to try and break it up with as much light as she can channel through herself. Though there's a wrinkle of her nose in disgust she endeavors to keep her features solemn, aware that whatever this thing is that Clea's no doubt more skilled in fighting it, but determined that she'll do what she can to make her job easier. Perhaps it's simply her Majesdanian physiology, or her radiant energy that keeps the horrors to flickering images at the corner of her vision... shadows she tries hard not to look at directly in favor of the task at hand. In many ways it's cathardic to be back and fight something she wont have to try and negotiate with afterwards.
Clea	--"I could avoid it, but I won't."--     Clea finishes targeting the undead fish flopping around on the gravel beach beside the Hudson, incinerating the last such poor creature, before lifting higher into the air to examine Karolina's progress against the beast. Much of its moldy 'flesh' has been singed white and is crumbling to dry dust, which is good; what's bad is, its growth seems to be exceeding the amount of damage even those sunbursts are inflicting on a creature from a black-sun world. Clea's face twists in disgust and fear at the prospect of this monster growing more, beyond the boundaries of this isolated zone to where the public can see it ...     Her resolve steels. Kill the body, banish the spirit. Clea's fingers stretch out into arcane gestures and she gets to work, holding back nothing. The Bolts of Bedevilment arc smoothly, organically, nonsensically through the air, pounding into the Starseed's body. "Maybe our combined powers will make some headway!" she shouts at the metahuman on the roof.
Crimson Avenger	Lee Travis Lee walked through the street of queens rather cautiously..though his costume was turning out to be a much better disguise than he thought it would he still need to be careful...one mistep could make his eye mask fall off revealing his identity to anyone who botherd to watch any GNN. As he approached the hudson he would hear the sounds of a fight..not so obvious to where the people would see it but they sounds where clear enough to where he could follow it. What he saw was not what he expected to see...it was some giant squid man fighting two women who to his best guess where metas using energy powers. "Holy....Fuck"! He would shout staring at the creature in disbelif but at that moment a weird fishman would start to lurch toward him and in a panic Lee pulled out his pistol and unloaded a full clip into it, but he noticed more of them approaching him, and it seemed to him that squidward noticed him to. Realizing that the only way out was to fight lee would pull out his seconf pistol load it with a leathal clip and began to open fire on the fishmen
Karolina	"What do you need me to do?" Karolina calls in Clea's direction from her spot on one of the buildings. She's a radiant beacon of rainbow light that is hardly hiding her presence under the circumstances, an easy spot for others. One of the black tentacles suddenly crashes near her feet as she's distracted by the sound of gunshots, missing only because of the searing energy and that where the building's corner crumbles the alien girl remains aloft.     "Someone's in trouble!" she calls, unnecessarily, letting Clea guide as to whether she's better served pouring the power on the monstrosity or going to find Lee.
Clea	--"'cause one day, Death'd come to me,"--     "Help him!" Clea yells, decisively. This is getting out of hand, and the new mortal's mind is unlikely to be in danger as long as the Mists of Munnopor continue to block the Starseed's psychic enervation, but it's still dangerous. It's still one more person who knows too much.     Jupiter moves into alignment: secrets reign. Clea intones as quickly as she can, "A small maiden contained in a monster's cooking pot struck it with her heel, and the crack let in the sky. The Crimson Bands of Cyttorak!" Streaks of weirdly two-dimensional light that hurt the brain to try to perceive fly out of her hands, encircling the titanic mold-monster rising out of the bay in five rings without touching it; but even so, the bands seem to be holding it somehow, preventing it from moving except to shake and struggle within the circles surrounding it.     For now. The bands are beginning to crack like glass even at this moment.     "You, gunman!" Clea shouts down desperately. "It's a psychic alien mold!" Which it isn't, but the lie is useful, and it's not too far off from the truth. "Don't stop fighting it! The intent to fight matters more than your bullets!"
Crimson Avenger	Lee Travis Lee would continue to open fire on the group of fishmen as they continued to approach him, To him the more that he took out more showed up. He was on his second and third clips respectively when he heard One of the women shout at him to keep fighting and something about his will to fight mattered more than his bullets. Focusing more he would nod and wipe sweat from under his fedora before continuing to open fire on these weird fishmen, god knows how long he can keep this up before he runs out of ammo.
Karolina	There's no need to tell Karolina twice, the rainbow girls contrail of iridescent energy marks her path as she sweeps off, sending out blasts of cosmic energy as she approaches Lee's position to try and buy him the space so she can sweep in and hover overhead as she endeavors to extend her aura to envelop him,"Hi! Don't shoot! We're going to go up." she calls down brightly, trying to keep an eye on what's going on with Clea but taking care of the business of making sure that Lee's in a position to snipe instead of waiting to be overrun.
Clea	--"and say, 'Baby, didn't you know?'"--     The Crimson Bands are cracking, nearly done now. It's possible Clea would be able to hold them against this nascent from of a Great Old One if she concentrated all her power on it, but she daren't. The Mists must be maintained, to block its ability to feed and grow larger still. "The binding is failing! I need you both to distract the creature so I can focus on one last attack!" Clea yells down at her new, unnamed allies. Yelling her plan openly in front of the enemy. Either she's paying no consideration to the possibility that the creature might hear her and adjust its tactics, or she thinks it's unable to comprehend her speech ... or, if you're aware of what this Starseed is, the third possibility is that she's banking on its insane, alien brain being unable to process rational, human information. Whatever the options are, she can only hope her allies will destroy enough of the creature's mass to attract its attention and, maybe, to make her job easier as she folds her ankles over her knees, hovering in mid-air, mind reaching across dimensions to the Dreamlands from whence it came. Her purple-gauntleted hands move slowly and carefully in arcane anti-patterns as she says loudly and firmly, "By the Winds of Watoomb: Once, there was a maiden who was born and told her mom, 'I know how I'm gonna die...'"
Crimson Avenger	Lee Travis Lee would suddenly look up and see another woman who was floating via a very colorful arua that enveloped her, She told lee not to shoot which with Lee found pretty hard becuase with everything he had seen so far she could of been in league with the fish men he was shooting at. Having to make a split secoind decision Lee would says to her," Anything is better that down here Blonde". He then heard the the woman he first saw call out to them to distract the creature so she can do a final attack of sorts. He would then turn his pistols turned the mold and begin to open fire on it in hopes that it would atleast distract it
Karolina	Karolina doesn't endeavor to fly too fast; she figures a man with a gun is probably not used to being dragged through the air on cosmic energy, but up towards a roof is at least a safer spot to set him down. Once deposited the glowing creature flits off, darting between a pair of the tentacles to distract it not with a heavy blast this time, but by shooting any of the tendrils she can and giving it a target other than Lee or Clea to worry about. A firefly of distraction to give the monster a shiny target to focus on.
Clea	The Great Old Ones share very few traits with humanity, but one is this: rage. It must respond to attacks, to the stinging metal that digs deep grooves into the dark mold of its body and splinter the yellow tendrils of harder fungal growths, to the hateful sunlight that burns the mold dry and sends inert dust wafting off its body. The blue cloud surrounding its head doesn't seem to stop it from locating the humans well enough to attack them, but then, who really thought a sixty-foot pillar of mold needed eyes to see, anyway?     The Starseed swings hard and accurately, its grotesque mockery of arms homing in on each of the two mortal heroes, forcing them to do their best to avoid the thing lest they be swatted by limbs the size of telephone poles, all while Clea, the white-haired woman in the purple and pink onesie, floats in the air and pronounces gibberish in a loud, firm, voice: "'It's gonna hurt bad, and I ain't coming back. I could avoid it, but I won't. 'cause Death would find me and say, "Baby, didn't you know?"'" And her nonsense must be having some effect; an orpiment mist is gathering behind the creature's back..
Crimson Avenger	Lee Travis Lee would panic when he saw the arm heading straight towards him," Holy Fuck this is not how i saw my day going". He would say as he jumped over the arm that was heading towards him, the jump allowed him to barley miss the arm, just barley. He would then in a attempt to end the fight fire one of his gas bullets at the creature which he aimed directly at the creatures face
Karolina	There's an eek from Karolina, it takes all her speed and the best blast she can pull in order to avoid getting swatted like a bug. It doesn't stop her from moving, still, even if she's going for more distance for the sake of protecting herself. She has no idea what Clea's chanting, and doesn't endeavor to interfere in favor of simply trying to keep herself alive and the monstrosity from killing anyone important.
Clea	Five-dimensional colors gather around Clea's eyes and hands, coruscant with power. As her chant progresses, her voice deepens and broadens and takes on aspects there are no words for; it's like multiple voices are speaking from her mouth, except how it's not like that at all, it's just the best description a mortal mind can come to what's happening as she very clearly pronounces the final words:     "There's always an ending."     The yellow mists behind the Starseed bulge and split tumorously, revealing a portal to a landscape shrouded in yellow mists through which barely-glimpsed shapes move malevolently. It's revolting in primal, atavistic way, like when you watch a flipped-over spider stretch out its legs and see the strange places where its legs segment out of its belly; but from behind Clea, from before the monster and the portal behind it, a wind is blowing, a typhoon that doesn't shake a single leaf or move a pebble on the beach but that hits the monster with enough forces to shred its half-liquid, half-plant body, blasting huge chunks of it backward through the portal. The beast leans forward into the wind, trying to fight it, but with each boulder-sized chunk of its body displaced by the seemingly savage winds, it grows weaker, and in less than half a minute it's gone, absorbed into ... whatever world that was.     That's one job taken care of. Now, to take care of the last of it.
Crimson Avenger	Lee Travis Lee let out a relived sigh as he saw the creature vanish, he had survived his first encounter with a powered being, and that thought made him slightly relived, but he hoped that it would be a situation that he could avoid more often. He would straighten out his red overcoat and Fedora and say to himself," Well, i was not really expecting that out of my night," as he finished fixing up his fedora he would shout out while reloading his pistols," Nice Job ladies, we just defeated..whatever the fuck that was and none of us died, so their is that".
Karolina	Karolina alights back on the roof near Lee as it finally fades out of sight and looks over the edge to see where Clea might have gotten to,"You're unhurt?" the glowing woman enquires to be on the safe side, both for the reporter and the magician, before adding for Clea,"What /was/ that anyways?"
Clea	Clea unfolds her legs from the sitting position to fly more normally (to the degree that flight can be normal) over to Karolina and Lee. "Thank you both," she says tiredly. "This was ... not a good day, but you helped save it. Thank you. But we're not done yet. That thing is a psychic entity. Knowledge of it forms a psychic bond it can use to infect your minds and return here. Probably by bursting out of your bodies. I have to erase your memories of the last ten minutes. Do you understand?"
Karolina	"Erase my mind?" Karolina repeats with blatant puzzlement,"So some kind of... magic, then?" she asks of Clea, cautious but, well, all things considered, at least reasonably willing to trust and apparently experienced with the idea that some things aren't meant to be remembered,"If it's necessary to prevent that from attacking someone else. Of course. I would hate to be the cause of destruction." the rainbow-hued crature offers with an accepting nod of her head.
Clea	"The first person attacked being you," Clea says wryly but seriously; an interesting combination of tones. "But your mind will be fine. I'll just cut out the last ten minutes of your memories. It'll be no more weird than when you're driving home and realize you were on such auto-pilot you don't even remember the drive. The Vapors of Valtorr are gentle, and painless." Clea's arms circle slowly, like opposing windmills, and indeed, visible vapors do begin to accumulate in front of, green mists that smell like the sound of a rabbit chirping as it drifts without gravity through a field of poppies that haven't yet dreamed of becoming opium and just reach their roots deeper into the warm ground surrounding themselves on all sides by warmth and     Wait, what were you thinking about just now?
Crimson Avenger	"Where the hell am i"?, Lee would say looking around why was he in the banks of the hudson, why was he in his Scarlet Avenger uniform, and who the hell where these ladies, these where many questions lee would cicrle through his mind as he looked around. He would then say," Who are you people and why are we on the banks of the hudson river and why," He would sniff the air," Do i smell like a fish cannery"?