DeviousMe

"If it can't, we've got yalls covered." Vox and the group heard from behind the man, the Khelari and Cerosian joining the assembled heroes. It had taken some convincing on Acid's part, Kauruk very hesitant to let his friend, a publicly- but not very well-known villain, walk right into a situation that could be his undoing. The scaleless reptilian hadn't taken no for an answer though, his own feelings on the matter of the whale very strong indeed.

"Four-legs here can work a good few gigawatts." Acid indicated the Summoner with a gesture of a clawed thumb out of crossed arms. Then he nodded up at the whale and those on him, "Just say where ya need it and you've got it. Oh, and...yalls might wanna call off that GMC team from the PPD, otherwise they probably won't be too happy when they get here and find nothing but a big empty spot..."

((Pst - except for the heroes, no one's in the water anymore. ))

Okay, that would really suck. Even if they just shifted everything to somewhere else, the time and effort it would take would shut the European side down for weeks. I really hope someone in that legislation gets a moment of common sense soon, otherwise this is actually a very real possibility.

((Dang, I was really hoping someone would take me up on that. Oh well.))

Kauruk backpedaled with a start upon the woman he'd wanted to pick up letting loose a shriek that could've made all honor to a weapons-grade sonic burst. Planted on his rear by the surprise, he could do nothing but look on in confusion as the formerly only weakly moving human was suddenly right as rain, taking off in a general direction of inland with terrific speed. He hadn't known humans could do that.

"Yeh, they run pretty fast, don't they?" he heard a familiar voice, turning to look at the approaching Khelari, who'd finally made his way back to the beach. The formerly so nice shirt hung crumpled around his shoulders, his clothes the only thing on him that retained any water.

"Honestly, I don't know why I bothered to even wear these." he remarked with a sigh in that regard, "Well, at least it's not blood for once. How you doin'?"

"Estranged, but well." the General replied, standing again. He shook again before looking out to sea, "I lost my Called, but they're expendable. Everyone's out of the water now too, so it's not much of a tragedy."

Acid chuckled. He could imagine well the thoughts of those the demons had rescued. This'd make one heck of a story to well.

"Not bad." he patted the Summoner on the shoulder, "Now then, let's get out of here before any of these 'heroes' gets wise to us. It'd really suck to get arrested on my day off..."

((He's not that large, actually. Think horse.))

"Hmh." the Summoner grumbled back, not entirely sure what to make of this. Deception was a very valid tactic for a villain in the Kheldian's position to use right now. Still, the man had insulted the 'bug' right after apologzing to him...which really did suggest he simply wasn't that bright; at least to Kauruk.

He would've made a remark in that regard as well, but a certain whale of a wail on the mental plane crashed against the General's mind (as well as the demons he'd called) then and there. The Cerosian dragon winced in pain and stumbled to the side, but managed to maintain his balance. His henchmen weren't so fortunate, falling toward the waters with horrid wails of their own, clutching their heads as if to keep them from bursting. It didn't help. Kauruk cleared his own head with a vigorous shake just in time to see them crash into the waves.

"So much for that." he remarked with a sharp, dissatisfied exhale through his nostrils as he looked about. He played briefly with the idea of opening another Oblivion Gate, but tossed it away again once he'd reassessed the situation. It seemed the threat had passed from the immediate area, and - at least judging by the shouts that newly arrived monochromatic female barked about - that the recovery efforts weren't going too well.

"Contact the appropriate authorities." Kauruk thus told the Kheldian in a neutral tone before walking away, fairly sure the man would know the names of the organizations that needed to be called to render assistance - or at least know them better than he. Asking him to put out a call to 'Paragon Citizen Maintenance and Repair' would've just ended in confusion, after all. Heck, from what the Summoner had seen to far, they didn't even have a Watcher here, which likely meant any terminology related to Cerosian law enforcement and population maintenance would've been gibberish.

Unfortunately, while Kauruk had taken that much into account, he'd forgotten that people here tended not to have telecommunication implants.

And that they didn't pick up others with their mouths.

The first person he attempted to lift thus certainly didn't react in a way he'd have considered normal...

((Tag to anyone who feels like being it. Fair warning: he ate garlic pasta for lunch. ))

((Kyo, Kauruk's a purple dragon, not a lizard man. Yes, purple. ))

I'm devious little me, and...I'm a lurker.

Gotta wonder where that quarter went...

A sudden shriek of terror caught Kauruk's attention, the claws of his paws digging into the sand as he tried to stop then and there, but found his momentum just a bit of a hindrance. He still stopped though, and just in time to spot a Kheldian raise an arm toward a Klackeradomm, the General's left eye assessing both registries posthaste. Unfortunately, he didn't get time to dwell on it, the sudden warning of a building gravitic disturbance in the Kheldian's arm shifting his reaction to instinct base. The warp module immediately began its calculation.

Still, he knew it wouldn't be done in time. He needed to do something else, and he needed to do it quick. Since he couldn't get over there this instant, he did the next-best thing: he threw something that traveled instantaneously.

A spatial warp clasped shut about the large centipede, deflecting the man's attack from its intended target, a sphere of rippling air that now protected him the only other visible effect. Well, until Kauruk made the jump, that was.

The Summoner warped in before the man from one instant to another, the air about him seeming to become a distorting lens for a few moments as the side-effects of the short-range jump dissipated. Whether or not this was a good thing, however, remained to be seen, as the rather displeased-looking General now glared at the Kheldian with forceful, narrowed eyes. After all, as far as he knew, the man had just frightened a human woman, then attacked another beach patron, which could only mean that he was some villain in league with the whale that had been attacking the very same people...

"Aw snap." was all Acid had to say as the whale fell, mind's eye already seeing the wave rise up before him. He looked about for something to cling onto, but there just wasn't anything solid enough around out here. With a sigh, he rammed his hands and feet into the wet sand, preparing to ride it out. No dice. Despite his claws allowing him to anchor deeper than a human, the force of the water simply swept him away.

General Kauruk, however, had a somewhat easier time. While he wasn't any larger than a horse, the Cerosian dragon's aerodynamics translated well into a hydrosphere (being a quadruped didn't hurt either stability-wise), allowing the Summoner to pierce the wave's base. Though the water tugged at him regardless as it rushed about his body, pulling especially against the silver-blue interior membranes of his wings, he weathered the wash well, by its passing now completely free of sand. At this point, a keen observer might've noted that the color discrepancy of his throat plates extended onto his chest, as well as that a few of the normally silver-blue spikes at the base of his neck, just between the shoulders, also carried a much more metallic-silver hue than the rest.

Dripping-wet now, the first thing he did was shake like a dog. Then he took in the situation, and it didn't look good. Many people had been swept inland, likely rammed into something solid, like a building, rock, or lantern pole. But those he wasn't too worried about. The local Healers would be able to reach them. The ones the backwash had sucked into the sea, however, were not so fortunate. They were the ones who needed help. So the Summoner did what he did. He summoned.

The pale-orange eye of the Oblivion Gate opened with a crack of thunder, the swirling, blood-red mists that rimmed it outlining an oval roughly six meters tall and three wide, its base hovering mere centimeters in the air. Kauruk didn't have time to synchronize it with the local spheres, so he just took what he could get quickest, calling a flight of three lesser demons from Cerosia. A little smaller than a human, winged, and tailing sapphire-blue auras, the General's henchmen needed no vocal command to know his orders and headed right for the nearest people struggling in the water.

Unfortunately, the General didn't even think to consider how said people would respond to that, for he knew the demons' intent. Thus he directed his attention toward the root of this disaster, and broke into a run toward the general area where the whale had fallen...

I nominate "The All-Seeing Eye" (57352) by Steele Magnolia.

Not too far away, a certain reptilian extraterrestrial that carried not a hint of a scale anywhere on his leathery, deep-green hide lay in the warm sand on his back without a care in the world. Garbed in a pair of slate-gray swim shorts and an open, loose shirt patterned with flowers in hues of blue (which mostly had the purpose of making the humans more comfortable, though whether they accomplished this with the clearly visible presence of all those sharp teeth in the reptilian's predatory maw was up for debate), the fictitiously named Acid Zero did what Khelari did best.

Sleep.

Things crashed around him, people screamed over him, thunder boomed, bombs fell...and he just slept, unbothered. There were those who said a Khelari could sleep through the sound of a cannon they happened to lie on - and indeed they could. Contact, unfortunately, was en entirely different matter.

A sand shovel dropped from high in the sky and right onto his nose.

"Whowhatwherewhenwhy?!" Acid bolted up like greased lightning, head whipping about jerkily as his only gradually (relatively) adapting mind came up to speed and attempted to re-synchronize with his senses.

And then he spotted the floating whale terrorizing the beach.

His should to the gigh heavens was almost immediate, the reptilian loosing a most forceful, "General!"

"Whowhatwherewhenwhy?!" the long, narrow, and purple-scaled head of a dragon burst from the sand next to him, despite its larger size and a pair of rearward-jutting, silver-blue horns at its back performing the same motions with almost the same speed. Smaller ones poked through the hide in the form of a spike line, beginning just between his eyes and running down his neck into the sand, and a large scar graced his left eye socket, the eyeball inside black as the night and its iris red as the morning dawn. This of course stood in stark contrast to the right, which held an emerald-green iris upon usual white. A few segments of the silver-blue plating that protected his throat didn't quite look right either, carrying just a bit more silver than what matched.

"Me, that, there, now, and I ain't got a clue." Acid's ice-gray pupils glared back at him while the reptilian pointed a clawed finger at the hovering whale, "Are you summoning junk in your sleep again?"

"What? Of course not!" the Summoner retorted with a curt, defiant shake of his head before realizing he actually didn't have any way of determining that, "Uhh...I mean..."

"Right." the reptilian's eyes narrowed with displeasure. And it had been such a nice day too. He stood with a sigh, wiping the sand off his clothes, "I'll go try and talk to it. You stay here and figure out if it's one of your demons or not."

"Very well." came the answer with a nod as Acid began walking, though sadly it was a little easier said than done. Attempting to ask the humans who came running by screaming only caused them to scream louder and run faster, albeit with general course changes away from the 'second beach monster' or something like that...

Heh, finally get some time to post my welcome as well. So here it is: welcome one and all from Austria by ways of Texas. Yeh, that's right, I hop around both sides of the pond, so I can assure yalls that Lord Nemesis is most certainly down with the street, as it were.

These made of win and awesome. Keep 'em coming.

No worries, LJ. I can just grab it straight off DA - though the 'bad news' isn't so much that it's not colored (it's damn cool as-is ), but that I'm not really sure where I could put it since you drew him waaay too buff (Ken: I wish I had all that muscle ) and your first work already captured him so well that it became the new headshot ofhis profile. The 2.0 is of course greatly appreciated, but with the near-perfection of the 1.0...not sure where to put it.

And to be fair, the original character was created by a friend of mine. The only thing I'm responsible for is putting him in the game. We were just talking one day and I asked if those few residual wing muscles still worked. He said yes, and with that Ken was suddenly wearing shrink pants and a crab pack in the world of CoX. So the Ken you see today is the idea of two people, not just one - just like his command crew, Groul and Arek, are compound characters from other friends of mine.

Ho snap, it's a real Ascendant sighting!

Yeah, sorry about that, LJ. It was kind of the only detailed reference I had for Ken at the time. Thanks to Bayani and Brandon McKinney, however, I've got a slanted view now, so if I ever get the funds to nab something from you for Ken or his crew, now there's another reference to use.

Happy, happy birthday,
from all of us to you,
we wish you happy birthday
so here now have a shoe.

Yeah, the cyborg booster pack is pretty good for robots. If you don't have the cash to spring for it though, I suggest you try mixing 'Enforcer' details with robotic face textures; that might work for you.

Flight Leader has pizza! Everyone get him!