“Where are you hiding, mimicspawn? You great great grandmother laid with monsters and your great grandfather ate his subjects! You’re the product of generations of incest and bestiality! At the same time!” John’s voice echoed through the massive empty plaza as his minions tooled around, looking for them.

Heather glanced over at Perry, raising a brow at him as they hid behind a rack of clothes.

“Do not ask. It’s treason if you ask.” Perry whispered.

Heather’s brows rose further.

“You look like you’re going to ask.”

“You’ve got no jurisdiction here, Duke of Nuttingham. You’re damn right I’m going to ask.” Heather whispered back.

Perry glanced past the rack and quickly hid again: the man’s cronies were puttering around on their horse-cycles, looking for them.

“Well, save it for the hotel room. Oooh, I like this top,” Perry said, taking one of the shirts across from them off the rack and feeling the soft fabric between his fingers. “You think we could get Nat some nice clothes and then tailor them to fit? It’s not rocket science. I’m a tinker: all I would need is a sewing machine and a pair of scissors.”

“That one’s too bright for her. She wants people to take her seriously. She doesn’t like dressing in pastels because people mistake her for a kid. You want something like this.”

Heather pulled a more somber top off the rack and showed it to him.

“This is what you want. This says ‘I’m an adult, and I expect to be taken seriously’.”

“You can’t unilaterally ban a color scheme.” Perry said. “Besides, it’s not about the color. People mistake her for a kid because none of her clothes are designed to fit her body. I guarantee if you tailored this to show off her –“

“They’re over here!”

“Shoot,” Perry muttered as the two of them scrambled away.

They ran out the back of the shop and sprinted down the employee backhalls that connected the facades of the shopfronts, allowing goods to be restocked without cluttering up the pedestrian areas facing the inner plaza.

“I really wanted to get more shopping done, but it seems like it’s always a life-or-death battle when we hang out. Usually because of your family,” Heather complained.

“I distinctly remember your family being the problem a month ago,” Perry said as they turned a corner at full speed.

Heather whipped out an arm across the hallway and clotheslined the horse-cycle riding minion chasing them, all while giving Perry a scowl.

“Right. Too soon. Sorry.”

“Nah,” Heather said, relaxing her shoulders and heaving a sigh. “I’m over it. Or at least I wanna be. Dad was the kind of guy…who is better off not existing. There’s just…a lot of him living rent-free in my head.”

Perry pulled out a can of bear spray and hit the stunned rider in the eyes before foaming his thrashing body to the ground, taking him permanently out of the game.

“You wanna talk to Sophie about it when we get back?” Perry asked.

“Who?”

“Sophie. The sex angel. She’s a licensed therapist.”

“Since when?”

“I think she passed the Earth exam two weeks after I summoned her. But she’s got like…Five thousand years of experience counselling dead warriors with PTSD.”

“And banging them.” Heather rolled her eyes.

“Which is good for PTSD.” Perry shrugged.

“Yeah, I guess I might talk to her.” Heather said. “I don’t have to pay, right?”

“I don’t think she’d make you pay, no.” Perry said, glancing around. “Was that the last of them?”

They’d retreated from the nocul prince and taken a different tactic as his minions recovered and began putting a lot of pressure on them. Divide and Conquer.

They were isolating and pinning the individual Noculs in foam that would take serious chemicals or heavy machinery to release.

Once they were all permanently out of the fight, they could beat John with the assistance of Hardcase, who was currently setting up the last trap, scooby-doo style.

Perry briefly counted the number of nocul they’d stuck to the walls and floor over the past few minutes.

“I think we got three left to bag.”

“So, why can’t this John guy just peel his minions out of your foam? He’s magical right? At least, his hair is, anyway.” Heather said.

“Too much focus on combat and not enough utility, which is poor wizarding,” Perry said with a shrug. “He’d be as likely to kill his minions as get them unstuck.”

“I mean, we’re about to get all his guys. What if he just runs away?” Heather asked.

“I’ll suck the marrow from your bones and shit in the empty cavities!” A voice echoed all the way down from the plaza.

“I don’t think that’ll be a problem.” Perry said with a shrug, a shopfront catching his eye.

“Hey, you wanna check out the tailoring shop on the fifth floor?” Perry asked, pointing up and across the plaza at the shop with the comically oversized scissors and measuring tape above the door.

“Oh, you were serious?”

“We’re here now, and only being able to find kid’s stuff for Nat was seriously disappointing. I got an itch in my brain, and I need to see this bit through or I won’t be able to get to sleep tonight.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“We go into the shop, grab what we need, leave some chits by the till and get out before they find us.” Perry said. “And if they do…the shop’s probably insured.”

“Alright, let’s make it happen.”

***One looted tailoring shop later***

“Alright, we’re ready,” Perry said, dropping off his scissors, sewing machine, measuring tools, pins, thread, bolts of fabric and double-sided body tape. “Got the last of the bad guys and the supplies I’ll need for later.

“What are those for?” Hardcase asked.

“I got an ‘Itch’.” Perry said by way of explanation. It was a well-known phenomena where a Tinker got an idea for a project, and couldn’t rest until they saw it through.

Perry’s structural battery tech being a case in point.

“Are you looting?” She demanded.

“Nonono, I left more than enough chits to cover the purchase.” Perry said. “I mean, if anything, since the purchase wasn’t officially recorded, they’ll be able to claim insurance on it as a theft, and keep the chits I put behind the desk. They’re practically getting paid twice.”

“Alright, push it off until later if you can. I want your full attention on the plan,” Hardcase said, laying out a ‘you are here’ map she’d pried off a nearby wall and drawn up the battle plan on.

“Alright, I’ve placed traps at these four locations,” Hardcase said, marking them out to Perry and Heather with a dry erase marker that she’d looted from a stationary store.

“An easy way to remember where they are is that they’re all in cardinal directions from this fountain.” She tapped a square fountain.

“According to Perry, he probably can’t teleport rapidfire.”

“That’s not the kind of spell you can do multiple times back-to-back,” Perry said, shaking his head.

“So we’re gonna trap him in one of these spaces, which will force him to-“

The sound of a tiny scrape of shoe grit against tile was all the warning Perry got.

He leapt forward and tackled Hardcase to the ground as a flame lance shot through the space they’d been sitting.

HP: 2

Perry’s back stung as the fire passed close enough to trigger HP loss. He tucked Hardcase’s face and arms underneath his body until the fire was gone, then leapt to his feet and hauled her out of the way of another attack.

Heather weathered the nearby flame well enough in her hyperweave and leapt up to the ceiling and began skittering haphazardly in order to avoid follow-up attacks.

Perry glanced over his shoulder and spotted the shriveled map, burnt to a crisp.

“Okay, let’s do your plan!”

“You don’t even know the plan!” Hardcase protested, stripping the walls of any incidental steel as she ran by.

“I got the first part!” Perry said. “Just tell us what to do when we get there!”

Sliding Stats

Attunement 26->22

Body 5->9

Perry picked up the Tinker like a sack of rice, eliciting a yelp as he threw her over his shoulder. This quickly became a scream of terror as he jumped over the balcony overlooking the plaza, five stories below them.

A Body of nine was a multiplier of 1.55. Perry was already athletic, and a 55% boost was well and truly super levels of strength and speed.

Not quite enough to tear apart concrete with his bare hands. Enough to parkour his way down five stories with a screaming ninety pound weight over his shoulder?

Easy as pie.

“Oh my god!” Natalie screamed as Perry caught the next balcony down, then jumped down to the next one, before leaping over to a distant railing in time to avoid being burnt to a crisp.

Finally Perry jumped the last balcony, absorbing the shock with his knees, which would have crumpled if he’d been any weaker.

Side note: Knee-related injuries are one of the most common reasons for cape retirement, ranking fifth after ‘eaten by prawn’.

Heather glided down from the fifth story, manta-wings folding back into her body as she alighted beside them, sprinting alongside as John came flying after them.

Perry wasn’t wearing his armor because of the gaping hole in it, but he was still keeping one undamaged suit as an emergency safeguard. As John approached on his horse-cycle, Perry mentally commanded the last suit to swoop down and smash into the side of the nocul prince’s ride, sending both of them tumbling to the side.

POOF!

“Maybe we should be the ones running away?” Heather said, glancing over his shoulder at where Perry’s aluminum armor was slagged by return-fire.

“That is an option,” Perry said. “But I’m confident that Hardcase’s plan is going to work.”

“Over there!” Hardcase pointed at an alcove straight across from the fountain. It was a secluded corner of the plaza, and Perry could faintly make out a bundle of his insulation foam cannisters hanging from the ceiling in the shadows, where the fluorescent lighting used to be.

They had an improvised detonator sandwiched in the center of them.

Ah, I’m starting to see where she’s going with this.

“Drop me here!” Hardcase said, and Perry did so, dropping her off behind a pillar, where she split off from them to do her own thing.

RRRRR

The sound of the nocul’s horse-cycle grew as he recovered from his tumble and began catching up with Perry, not paying any attention to Natalie or Heather as they split off from him.

I guess I’m the bait. Fantastic.

Perry’s FPS friends in middle school had a saying: The Distraction Gets the Action.

And that saying was proved wildly correct as Perry sprinted for the foam trap.

Despite the enhanced speed and strength of Body, the human form was simply not built to out-run a motorcycle. When the revving of the engine sounded like it was seconds away from crawling up his spine, Perry leapt into the air and twisted.

In a move that would’ve made the highlight reel on the wall, Perry pushed off the chrome horse-head trying to run him over with both feet, propelling himself violently backward. Perry flew through the air, directly under the makeshift trap, which exploded a fraction of a second after he passed under it.

A massive curtain of foam descended from the ceiling to the floor, catching the approaching nocul even as he tried to swerve out of the way.

SLAM!

Perry hit the wall head-first, nearly breaking his neck.

HP:1

I got HP to spare, Perry thought, peeling himself away from the wall and stretching his neck to loosen the kink.

Perry walked around the foam curtain stretching from floor to ceiling and spotted John Gabras embedded in the tan foam insulation, which was hardening around him at a prodigious rate.

“Beaten by insulation. That’s not gonna look good on your record,” Perry said, massaging his neck as the prince gave him a death-glare.

“Did you forget already?” The mage asked, cutting his palm and flinging the blood towards Perry.

Perry danced out of the way as a plate of scrap metal swooped down to the floor and caught all the blood spatters.

John Gabras’s eyes widened moments before he began to mummify.

As the mage’s body grew on top of Hardcase’s purloined steel door, she flicked her arms upward, and the solid magnetism controlling the door flung him violently into the sky, In the center of the plaza, where the black strands of Threads of Gintax caught him.

The Nocul prince dangled in the air above them, seemingly trapped in a feedback loop as his body tried to regenerate while the oily black threads attempted to mummify him.

He pulsed between wrinkled old man and rosy-cheeked youth, looking like he was having a real bad day.

“I guess she remembered.” Perry muttered.

“He’ll probably be fine,” Perry said as Heather and Nat approached, glancing up at distant figure above them. “Probably. Maybe.”

Perry heard the sound of sirens in the distance as the nocul struggled to stay alive in the web of his own devising.

Oh NOW they show up, Perry thought, before a more urgent though overrode his petty complaints.

“How does Washington city handle super vigilante fights?”

“I don’t think we wanna find out.” Hardcase said, shaking her head.

“Same.” Heather agreed.

“Well…I think now would be a good time to find an emergency exit and bail.” Perry said, mentally triggering the self-destruct on his damaged armors.

The tiny amounts of thermite hidden in his suits rendered them unidentifiable slag in moments as they ran, Perry pushing the shopping cart.

See, I’m learning.