((It's flexible plenty!
.....
Well. At least AFTER we get past the inflexible bits. >.>
Stick to the script...
Script: Lo!))
The party, sorcerers, and Hound all suddenly heard something.
A thud!
Followed by another. Then another...
Suddenly, the wrecked wall at the blank end of the juntion exploded as a monsterous construct burst through.
Babbage, Giant Clockwork Monster
Babbage didn't even slow down, he homed in on the Vanguard Truck, charging at it. The construct also threw two rounds of Ball Lightning at Ghoul and the Soulhound. The nasty thing about the electrical balls being that they exploded, and had a very large area of effect. Throwing Ball Lightning at any one opponent was essentially the same as just attacking all of your opponents at once. However, the giant machine left it at that, and sought to ram into the truck and tear it to shreds. It didn't even matter if the truck was armored and entirely reinforced with impervium, Babbage had enough strength to tear titanium girders into thousands of pieces, and barring that, he could easily hoist the truck and toss it somewhere that WOULD wreck it.
Backing Babbage up, five Assembler Princes sprang from the ruins after it. Instead of backing the giant monster up though, they attacked everybody else. Three of them leveled lightning bolts at the Sorcerers, while the other two focused their energies and started to conjure Clockwork minions and lieutenants to aid them in battle...
The Puddle-Man jumped up into the air to avoid the oncoming lightning balls. While in midair, his arms changed into something that looked a lot like broken tree stump. He threw his arms in an arc and peppered Babbage and the Assembler Princes with a hail of metal spines.
"Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid." - John Wayne
"Heads up, mother [censored]!" came a shout from up in the air.
Figuring that there wouldn't be much action, Ghoul had taken his time while jumping to where the Soulhound had gotten to. Thus he was about at the apex of his last jump when Babbage came bursting through the wall and rushed the Vanguard truck. Seeing such a huge target made Ghoul's aggressive instincts kick in and it wasn't very hard for him to change course in midair and land directly on the giant metal brute's head.
"Nobody kicks the [censored] of the heroes around here but ME!" he shouted as he landed and dug his hands into Babbage's thick skull.
Grunting with exertion, Ghoul literally shoved tiny tendrils of dark matter into the machine's innards. As they penetrated they grew wider and split Babbage's skeleton apart, much as the roots of a tree do to pavement. This attack didn't deal much damage in and of itself, but it drastically weakened the structure of the machine and rendered it less able to withstand heavy blows. Heavy blows that, for example, could be provided by the other metahumans of the group.
Statesman said let there be heroes, and there were heroes.
Lord Recluse said let there be villains, and there were villains.
NCsoft said let there be nothing, and there was nothing.
Bladewing shrugged off the electrical shock from Babbage's lightning, growling in annoyance.
"I was wondering when this bag of bolts was gonna show up."
Muttering a few arcane syllables under his breath Bladewing passed a hand over his katana. The katana, crackling with black lightning extended itself to six feet in length, turned inky black, and began to glow along its cutting edge.
"Now the fun begins!"
Grinning maniacally Bladewing sprinted at the princes that were assembling minions from the surrounding junk.
With two quick strokes, each leaving a scar of darkness in the air, he bisected them, but not before the assembled minions were given their sparks of life and turned to begin battering away at Bladewing's ankles, hips, and yanking on his tail.
"You, dear sir, are a legend. "- nelly. "PIE DOESN'T HAVE TENTACLES!"
Bladewing Draconian lvl 30 KAT/SR scrapper
DarkNinjutsu lvl 50 DM/REG scrapper
Dajoji Hino lvl 50 elm/ela scrapper
Bloody Byakko lvl 20 claws/sr scrapper
Energon X, still glowing and sparking from the temporary supercharge he'd given himself in the Vahzilok Camp, reacted... twitchily... to Babbage's appearance.
A lance of actinic blue-white power the thickness of an average man's waist stabbed out, slamming into Babbage hard enough to actually drive the monster back a pace, quickly followed by a peppering of lighter bolts as E-X leapt skyward, spiralling upward around its torso towards the head, intending to smash it with one of his terrific piledriver strikes.
Then the Ball Lightning hit, shorting out his techno wings briefly and knocking him, twitching, out of the sky as the sudden deadweight acted as a drag chute and killed his momentum. He crashed to an awkward halt in a pile of rubble and lay there for a second, stunned. Then he sighed with tinnily audible relief as the nanodocs inherent in his suit began their slow work of repair.
He scrambled to his feet, and glowing eyes fell on a luckless Assembler Prince that was homing in on his position. A pair of smashing overhead blows actually drove it several inches into the wrecked concrete, and a final straight jab ripped it out of its own private crater to smash into a wall ten feet away, bouncing to a loose-limbed, stunned halt. It got up again, but it was obviously somewhat the worse for the wear, once-bright brass scarred and dented, and the head nearly pushed into the ribcage.
A quick flutter of the psychtech wings to ensure they were working again, and the Blaster got airborne. A wave of his hand briefly cleared Bladewing's mob of anklebiters in a torrent of blue-white energy, knocking them into a scattered sprawl, and E-X nodded to him as he turned to Babbage again, beginning another rain of vicious energy blasts. Pity... the boost effect of using all those charms and ampers has worn off already. If this thing had attacked just ten seconds earlier, I could have done a lot more damage.
((Oh- the 'nanodocs in his armour' are just a reference to the automatic health regen that happens over time for any character in CoX- don't worry, he's not a Regen Blaster 
))
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head." Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates
MA Arcs: #12285, "Small Fears", #106553, "Trollbane", #12669, "How to Survive a Robot Uprising"
Dax almost flinched when the wave from the lightning ball hit him across the chest. The multitude of crystals that formed his being, which where closer to fine dust than the larger crystals the used earlier, shifted to absorb what little of the energy he had a chance to. I don't have time for this crap. I want a beer and a woman. Dax let go. His crystals separated into dust and he started to move toward Babbage. The crystal dust swirled about the clockwork getting into their internal systems and slowing them, much like scar tissue or bone shard will do to a shoulder or knee joint. I hate having to take an indirect route like this, but as long as the others do their job I'll be able to do more help this way than if I were swinging around my fist.
I do not know my reasons for posting, but post I must. ~~Build
"We can't stop here, this is bat country."
--Johnny Depp
"I ain't bi-curious, I'm a man. Why do you think I'm wearing this tight spandex and got all these muscles?" Meatwad
Seeing the other supers jumping into the fray, Puddle switched to a different tactic so he didn't kill them.
His arms started to thin until they came to a single point. That point was then fired at various joints in the Clockworks' bodies, helping to slow them down (And also taking out some of the smaller ones, like the Gears)
"Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid." - John Wayne
The Watcher wasn't happy when Babbage entered the scene. Sure, from his vantage point, he'd seen the thing coming from a ways away, but it would still slow things down.
Okay, please tell me - why did they have to come here again? Wasn't the plan to find this Brighid Moreira?
Plans change, my friend. You should know that better than anyone there. And I already told you.
Right, right. Got anything else for me?
Not at the moment, no. But don't worry. Just keep observing them, and we should soon know all we want to.
Right.
The mental conversation was of course secure, its facilitator taking great care to not revel that Watcher's presence, not to mention his location. Still, a very experienced telepath may have been able to pick up that something was going on around the task force...
--------------------
Babbage's ball lightning struck home, the reptilian creature apparently not fast enough to escape the electrical assault, barely having time to stand before the impact. Arcs of iridescent blue danced about the crimson-scaled quadruped, and with a series of twitches and spasms, the thing dropping sideways to the ground like a tied-up AT-AT Walker.
Eyes closed and body moving bit by bit, it was a safe bet that the tracker had just been knocked out cold by the electrical discharge.
If anyone put the reptilian under close scrutiny of their senses now, they would likely notice the flux across its scales had been disrupted, the waveform not quite reaching more than a small area about the collar anymore - which really made perfect sense when one considered that electricity did tend to disrupt magnetism. It seemed somewhat odd, however, that the absence of the flux had caused the creature to pass out.
The Sword duo seemed taken by surprise, the Sorcerer struck deftly by all three lightning bolts.
Thankfully, impervium was a good conductor, and the presently grounded state of the man seemed to allow the Sword Sorcerer to weather the lightning strikes without keeling over right away.
But that wasn't the half of said surprise for the others. That the bolts had harmed him to begin with rounded that out.
The Clockwork firing may have been Assembler Princes, but they were still just that - Clockwork. Now, Paragon City had many threats to its safety, and so had long ago developed a system of 'threat levels' to classify them upon their potency. Clockwork stood near the lower end of that ladder, their presence in Boomtown more precisely described as ranging from threat level fifteen to nineteen.
Not that this really mattered. The very best Clockwork still did not present a treat higher than level twenty.
And even the very newest Vanguard recruit, the most greenhorn operative around (had this organization been classified with the same system), was not assigned field duty until he or she could stand on even ground with a threat of at least level thirty-five.
The Colonel and Sorcerer, a part of the Sword as well as close to the upper echelons of Vanguard? Level fifty-two - not accounting for their rank. That meant even just one of them was a serious challenge for even the toughest villains around, and here stood two.
In summation: the Clockwork (excluding Babbage, of course...no, on second thought one monstrosity against a whole team of top-notch heroes was too) should have been in so deeply over their gear-filled heads that it wasn't even funny.
They should have been.
But they obviously weren't.
Nevertheless, the Sword Sorcerer's counterattack proved devastating, the arcane operative blasting a freezing sphere at the already slow Babbage (even when it ran at full speed, a non-sprinting hero could easily outpace the thing). The monster slowed to an even more languishing crawl, the heavy blow of frigid cold doing quite a number on its frame.
The Colonel's strike came to be even more unfair, the woman having a plethora of dastardly munitions to choose from the varied set of her long-barreled rifle, which she carefully aimed at the two remaining Assembler Princes, choosing the one closest to the mess of Gears that had sprung from the others.
The resulting WP round set everything ablaze for a respectable radius, leaving Clockwork all around suddenly standing in the insane heat of white phosphorous fires, patches burning wherever a fragment of the Willie Pete round had met an enemy...
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
That's when something proved horribly wrong.
The Vanguard troops must have read their info wrong.
Because anyone with a threat-level scanner would have identified ALL the Clockwork as solid level 50s.
While it was true that NORMAL Clockwork were only so powerful, these were hardly normal Clockwork.
Just as it was proven by Bladewing. While he might have THOUGHT he had completely deciamated the Clockwork Assembler he had choosen to attack, that reality did not take place.
His sword got about half-way through its body before stopping dead.
The Assembler Prince in question brought both its massive hands down on top of Bladewing's head in a brutal blow.
Energon's energy blasts did not impress Babbage at all. While Ghoul was doing an excellent job of corrupting the monster's armor, it wasn't enough to bring his overall resistance down to manageable levels. Thankfully, the giant did not reach up to tear him away. Yet. Finally, even with the sorcerer slowing him down a little, he still charged. He would reach the truck EVENTUALLY.
In the meantime, he threw a few more rounds of Ball Lightning at both the Sorcerers and at the annoying as ever Energon X...
The WP round aimed at the Assembler Princes did...NOTHING!
Just as the Sorcerer's shield of ignorance shielded them thouroughly from all the Clockwork's attacks, which were completely on par with theirs, it gaurded the Clockwork against their attacks as well.
The Clockwork were NOT amused in any way shape or form at being underated and underestimated. They let loose havoc.
The three Assembler Princes, having brushed aside the Sorcerer's attack, fired a return volley of their own, two of them launching lightning bolts in retaliation.
The cogs and various knights blasted away, were just that. Blasted away. They were not as powerful as their more sturdy compatriots.
That did not stop them from summoning more though. The two Assembler Princes unoccupied with attackers summoned another batch of Knights and Cogs to aid them, all of them reading as threat level 50.
This was, apparently, an actual FIGHT. NOT child's play.
Bladewing blinked as his katana was stopped dead in the middle of the assembler prince, then blinked again as it leveled a two handed hammerblow at his head.
Shifting his head sideways at a seemingly impossible angle, Bladewing dodged the hammerblow and tourqed his sword so it slid out of the prince.
Growling, Bladewing grabbed a few enhancement crystals from his pouch and broke them over his blade, causing motes of multicolored light to enwrap the blade and his body.
Glowing bright gold, Bladewing rushed to engage the Assembler prince's minions.
Dispatching them in a blinding flurry of swordsmanship. If one had tried to count the number of strokes, they would have been left agape as they lost count somewhere around 100, and the whole display took about 15 seconds.
EDIT: ((edited based on Diov's post (which i failed to see) and for storyline reasons)) 
"You, dear sir, are a legend. "- nelly. "PIE DOESN'T HAVE TENTACLES!"
Bladewing Draconian lvl 30 KAT/SR scrapper
DarkNinjutsu lvl 50 DM/REG scrapper
Dajoji Hino lvl 50 elm/ela scrapper
Bloody Byakko lvl 20 claws/sr scrapper
((So...just when did the local Clockwork suddenly transmogrify to lvl 50?))
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
((well Babbage is a GM...so hes tough enough no matter who you are...but the other clocks...well for sake of storyline Bladewing IS pretty much one shotting these guys, although we are "sorta" on a tf...hence the possible level modification....or maybe the AV we are hunting has somehow inproved them...i mean in the LGTF the clocks are around lvl 50...but they did go psy))
"You, dear sir, are a legend. "- nelly. "PIE DOESN'T HAVE TENTACLES!"
Bladewing Draconian lvl 30 KAT/SR scrapper
DarkNinjutsu lvl 50 DM/REG scrapper
Dajoji Hino lvl 50 elm/ela scrapper
Bloody Byakko lvl 20 claws/sr scrapper
((Quite, Babbage is fine. But yeah, they'd have to go psy if 50. These were described to be the normal ones 'local' to Boomtown, which stop at 19.))
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
(( hence the basic one shotting that we are doing XD))
"You, dear sir, are a legend. "- nelly. "PIE DOESN'T HAVE TENTACLES!"
Bladewing Draconian lvl 30 KAT/SR scrapper
DarkNinjutsu lvl 50 DM/REG scrapper
Dajoji Hino lvl 50 elm/ela scrapper
Bloody Byakko lvl 20 claws/sr scrapper
((True. And let's not forget that psy's only when CK goes into super-schizo-mode. 
Eh, then again, I guess NOT Cohen could be a psi guy too. Either way, we'll need to go one way or the other here, both at once don't work. 
))
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
(( Eh im happy to stick with the weakling clockwork so i can continue to one shot them with insanely flashy moves and such...take advantage of their weakness, dissasemble them in a way to make a scapper proud ))
"You, dear sir, are a legend. "- nelly. "PIE DOESN'T HAVE TENTACLES!"
Bladewing Draconian lvl 30 KAT/SR scrapper
DarkNinjutsu lvl 50 DM/REG scrapper
Dajoji Hino lvl 50 elm/ela scrapper
Bloody Byakko lvl 20 claws/sr scrapper
((Either that or I just bumped them up to level 50 so you COULDN'T one-shot them all, therefore actually making them a challange. Otherwise what would be the POINT in even having them?))
((Well, that's the thing - just 'bumping them to 50' doesn't work. The max you could make them is lvl 20. Otherwise, psy are needed.))
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
(( Diov makes a very good point ya know? Wait is this the script's doing?
Script: Lo!))
"You, dear sir, are a legend. "- nelly. "PIE DOESN'T HAVE TENTACLES!"
Bladewing Draconian lvl 30 KAT/SR scrapper
DarkNinjutsu lvl 50 DM/REG scrapper
Dajoji Hino lvl 50 elm/ela scrapper
Bloody Byakko lvl 20 claws/sr scrapper
((I made them level 50 by doing the following.
A: Entering them into an RP where security and threat levels are moot. 
If they have suddenly become important, I would like all of your levels please, so I can know who and who won't be dying in two shots.
Now an official RP reason as to why they are more powerful? The work of whoever is currently controling the Clockwork. I can't tell you EXACTLY why.))
(( lvl 50 Kat/SR scrapper my sig is out of date...with various other things...as you well know Diov :P))
"You, dear sir, are a legend. "- nelly. "PIE DOESN'T HAVE TENTACLES!"
Bladewing Draconian lvl 30 KAT/SR scrapper
DarkNinjutsu lvl 50 DM/REG scrapper
Dajoji Hino lvl 50 elm/ela scrapper
Bloody Byakko lvl 20 claws/sr scrapper
((Diov, I'm afraid you're not getting the point there. Levels have not suddenly become important. However, in-game levels are representative of something's relative standing. Clockwork are a fairly low-level villain group because of the way they are constructed: out of scrap. Loosely held-together scrap. That's also why they're weak to most damage types other than lethal.
Now yes, more powerful Clockwork do exist - the ones manufactured by Neuron and Anti-Matter are factory-made combat droids, well-armed-and-armored. In the same idea of higher level ()< better quality, when CK goes nuts, normal Clocks become Psychic Clockwork, which is a villain group from 45-50 (I think, might be 40-50), to represent that their make-up has shifted from semi-robotic piles of junk to constructs of almost pure psychic energy.
So here's the deal: there's no way normal Clockwork can be higher than lvl 20. They're just not built that way. Now, if Super-Evil Dude made his own Clockwork (ala Anti-Matter/Neuron) or is empowering regular Clockwork into Psychic Clockwork, then yes - but if it's the latter, you do need to denote they are psy, nor regular.
And if he made his own, I'm sorry to say that stuff like "they must have read their info wrong", "he THOUGHT he'd decimated the Assembler", "the attacks did nothing", and "shield of ignorance canceled out all attacks" isn't going to cut it here. You should've said something earlier, you forgot, so you went on another powertrip - and you know I'm right. No excuses.
Now then, we have 3 basic choices here:
1. The Clockwork were built by Super-Evil Dude (disguised or just look-alikes, doesn't really matter).
2. He got the King to turn them psy, or he did it himself.
3. The really, really, sneaky, low-down dastardly nasty thing that Clockwork as low as lvl 5 can do to give even lvl 50 heroes lots of grief. There was a hint of this in my earlier post. If that wasn't enough, PM me and I'll tell you. You'd like it. I know you would. ))
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
((O.O your contradicting Diov...in his own RP....I wish you luck in the afterlife of your choosing cause your gonna need it))
"You, dear sir, are a legend. "- nelly. "PIE DOESN'T HAVE TENTACLES!"
Bladewing Draconian lvl 30 KAT/SR scrapper
DarkNinjutsu lvl 50 DM/REG scrapper
Dajoji Hino lvl 50 elm/ela scrapper
Bloody Byakko lvl 20 claws/sr scrapper
((So? Call me crazy, but if I started writing stuff into an RP of mine that wouldn't work, I'd expect people to correct me on it. We actually had something like this happen with Grey a while back. If he hadn't corrected me, I would've never known I'd done something wrong. 
))
"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi
Characters
Energon X flashed out of the portal next to Bladewing, barely managing to pull a red-glowing punch enough to keep from removing the teleporter's head, instead smashing a large crater into one of the ruined walls. He shook his head violently, briefly filling the air around his head with streaks of yellow fire.
"Er... thanks." he mumbled. "There's a huge camp of Vahz... over..." he trailed off and waved his hand in a vague arc that covered pretty much every direction from Northwest to due East. "... that way?" He stared off into middle distance for a moment, then shrugged helplessly. "Anyways, that's where all the Vahzilok have ended up." he finished lamely.
He glanced at the soulhound for a moment, then stared at the rubble it was perched on. "I would make a depressedly cynical comment about it being inevitable that the City Rep is dead and buried once we found her, but since that thing supposedly tracks via souls, it's not too likely to find her after she's dead. So... where is she?"
The Vanguard truck pulled up around then, and he looked at the Vanguard duo oddly. According to the rumour mill, there are rumblings from within Vanguard that not everything is quite kosher with the Sword branch... and these two certainly aren't helping that perception. Unfortunately, I can't spend too much time studying them with everything else that's going on, although I'll certainly keep an eye on them...
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head." Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates
MA Arcs: #12285, "Small Fears", #106553, "Trollbane", #12669, "How to Survive a Robot Uprising"