Samora's adventuring party breaks up after the defeat of Belcorra.
It's an amicable breakup, with a last night of celebration at the Rowdy Rockfish where they buy a round for the house and promise to write each other. Phrenk goes back to Irrisen to finish his unfinished business with his relatives; Marshall stays in Otari and buys a bit of farmland and sets to learning what it's like not to be at war. And Samora goes to the Worldwound.
Or tries to, anyway. She teleports out--
Huh, something felt weird about that one.
Anyway, you've appeared on a lakeshore. It's winter -- at the Worldwound it is often winter -- and the water is just starting to crust over with ice. Beyond it, a flat scrubby plain cut with smooth gray roads rises into a gentle hill, with hints of another lake around it. Dirty dark snow is falling lazily, blown into the lake from behind you by a gentle -
Wait, actually that's ash.
Behind you, there's a rippling series of explosions, and a crushing roar.
It's about three balors tall. The shape is roughly human -- two arms, two legs, head -- but in spiky black stone, and rippling with lightning. Just now it has its back to you: two small flying figures are contesting it while a shiny steel(?) wall slowly grows behind them. The one on the left jerks upward abruptly, and a projectile streaks away into the creature's shoulder with another string of rapidfire booms. It takes a heavy step forward and lashes out with one hand, spraying wide globs of lava across the sky. The figure jerks again and manages to dodge; the lava falls somewhere beyond the rising wall.
It roars again, and the other figure wavers in midair, but doesn't fall. If they're doing anything it's not having an obvious effect.
Between you and it is an enormous pit, glowing with heat, about the right size for the creature to have dug its way out of.
The pit is about 200 feet away; the creature maybe 250 more beyond that.
What would you like to do?
The roads are weird and the air smells wrong and it's not important right now because DEMON LORD. Is the resistance being put up against it anything other than totally doomed?
Well, something's building that wall. Or maybe growing it; the way it's creeping up says more "fast-growing plant" than "wall of iron variant".
An opening in the wall flicks open, just for an instant. You have a brief impression of a crowd gathered around a huge metal bowl, lying on its side, and then there's a new kind of explosive bang (would Samora recognize a sonic boom?) and the crowd is covered with thick red smoke as the wall snaps shut again.
The demon lord falls to one knee, balanced with a claw in the soft earth.
That's more than enough excuse to join in. She starts sprinting towards the demon lord, until she's in Holy Smite range or something interferes with her.
You have to skirt the pit a little bit, so it takes about four moments to get into range. In that time two more fliers pop up over the wall: one firing big shiny balls, and one throwing...swords? You're a ways away but those seem like they might be swords. They're staying spread out, left/right and high/low, clearly trying to divide its attention.
It might be working. The demon lord is still down on one spiky knee, supporting itself with one claw and throwing fire with the other. It's switched to faster-firing sheets of flame instead of lava, but so far it hasn't hit anybody, and everybody it's not targeting takes the opportunity to open fire.
You bet.
(There's nobody easily accessible who looks like they need healing; Good damage should hurt it more than most other things.)
Well that was an interesting new kind of energy. Where did it even come from? It didn't do a lot of damage, but even so, Behemoth spreads out its senses and turns its useless head from side to side. What was that? Will it happen again?
Its next attack can wait a little bit.
She wants to hurt it, or hurt it more, but she doesn't want its full attention. She'll put a Shield of Faith on herself, for what little good she expects it to do, and if it doesn't attack her by the time she's done with that she'll add a Sure Casting, and if it still hasn't attacked her she'll drop a second Holy Smite. And she'll move sideways while she's doing all of that.
Samora has time to do all of that, because Behemoth is taking its time looking for her. Was it the moving group behind the wall? The bright thing by the pit? Something else it hasn't noticed yet?
In the Denver PRT defense HQ, Armsmaster is wondering the same thing. That glowing sphere doesn't seem to be hurting Behemoth much, but it might be distracting him and that's rarer. If they can figure out who's throwing it, and get them to sync with the Crusher Cannon (not his tech, not his name), they might be able to do some real damage before Behemoth pushes through into the warehouse district.
But he doesn't recognize the power, and neither does Dragon, so they have no idea who to talk to. Pings for the blasters who aren't already involved all come back negative. It takes them almost fifteen seconds to start looking for someone uninvolved, someone who wasn't at the rally point, doesn't have an armband, and just...wandered onto the battlefield on his own.
One of Dragon's reserve drones starts dropping through the atmosphere, scanning for living figures with line of sight on Behemoth.
She starts by scanning the nearby hilltop; the idea that someone might roll up and start blasting Behemoth from 200 feet out is not really in her model of parahuman behavior. It would take her a few minutes to spot Samora, but...
As the second Holy Smite lands, Behmoth decides to commit. He lurches to his feet, and pulls a huge glob of magma from the earth with his right claw. He throws it underhand toward the wall, about sixty feet left of where the cannon fired. The wall bends inward for just a moment, then shatters, collapsing away from the impact point in a rain of rounded mirrored shards. Pieces of metal, and at least one human body, are flung into the air above the impact point.
At the same time, he whips his left claw backward, broadly toward Samora. His aim is a little off, but that's fine: the sheet of fire that engulfs her is almost fifty feet wide.
Dragon's drone diverts. If they're lucky, there's someone at the site of that second attack who needs medical attention.
Honestly, Samora, you could use a little medical attention; that fire attack kicked like a high-powered fireball, even if it was more shaped like a giant burning hands.
You doubt if there's anyone in need of healing at the direct site of the lava attack, but there might be survivors on the periphery.
She can eat another one of those, but she can't prove that was the strongest thing it had. She needs to get coordinating with the other defenders; they might or might not know more about this particular demon lord than she does but she can at least do some healing, maybe buff someone who can hurt it more. She starts moving toward the most likely location for survivors, yelling "On me for a channel!"
One of the fliers is showering the demon in glowing green water, which got its attention: it's moving away from the hole it made in the wall and pursuing with big waves of fire and lightning. Nobody's been knocked out of the air yet.
That is to say, you have a clear path toward the space around the impact site. It looks like about a 3-moment run. Some folks are already up and moving. As the rest of the wall collapses you get view of the space it was defending: big boxy buildings cut into uneven rectangles by those strange gray roads. There are lots of people on the roofs and peeking around corners -- dozens, maybe even a hundred, gradually coming out of cover and aiming weapons or conjuring shields.
As Samora starts to run, though, a figure in elaborate full-body armor swoops down toward her. It's (he's?) about 8 feet tall, all angular metal in shiny greens and reds. A small pair of wings jut unmoving from its back. It's not carrying any obvious weapons, though of course in a getup like that the scope for non-obvious weapons is considerable.
The strange cape doesn't look like she needs medical assistance, but just in case: "Are you injured?"
By the bye, what does Dragon see, when she points her optics at Samora? What does she look like?
A woman of unclear ethnicity in a metal cuirass and a scarlet cloak, with a gem-studded headband on her brow, a shining metal shield in hand, and a sword sheathed at her side. She doesn't look old enough to drink, but she moves like a soldier and the burns the lava left on her arms don't seem to trouble her much. She's observing the armor with keen, curious silver eyes; it's strange to her, but a kind of strangeness she's accustomed to.
"Moderate* non-urgent. Just 'ported in; sitrep?"
(In the back of her mind she's tallying unexpected things. The roads, the air, the strangeness of the armor, this demon lord who is neither baphomet nor deskari, the armor, the perhaps heartening fact that the Good gods haven't intervened yet against a demon lord on the material.)
*Translator's note: Taldane has half a dozen different words for amounts of injury specifically. Samora is attempting to convey efficiently that she could stand to absorb something in the Cure Serious to Cure Critical range but could be twice as hurt as she is and stay up. Alas, English has done its own form of violence to the sentence.
No mask. Clearly not a newbie, that would be obvious even without her elaborate costume. No match for any heroes -- or villains -- that Dragon has on file. Almost certainly not American or Canadian, however good her English is. Brute enough to take that hit and come out only singed. That "ported in" is a relief; at least she knows where she is and who she's fighting. Though, who teleported her, and when, and why here specifically?
Dragon's thoughts can run in a thousand semi-relevant directions at once; her words, in moments like this, have to be rationed out like grains of plutonium. "Are you a blaster? We're falling back; I can fly you to one of the rally points." They'll have more time for details once they're in the air.
That question is unexpected and she suspects she isn't understanding everything about it but there's not time for a nuanced answer. "Yes-ish and please do." She prepares to be picked up and flown with in whichever of grab-a-wrist or fireman's carry this person prefers.
(Did that mean "Can you focus on damage output" or "Can you only focus on damage output" or "Do you usually focus on damage output" or "Did you prep a lot of evocations today"? Why is that the question and not "What circle?" Maybe this guy is from Tian Xia and has Tongues up; clearly the question makes perfect sense in his doctrine. Maybe something weirder.)
The armor's torso abruptly unfolds, like a clenched fist opening, into a curved seat and a waving set of dark metal(?) restraints. Underneath there's something softer, too firm to be cloth, in plain white. "Climb in. Face outward."
Assuming the stranger does, the restraints will wrap snugly around her torso and forehead, pressing her into the soft backing. Some people have a hard time with this aspect of the medevac suit, and Dragon will keep a close watch on her new guest's pulse and breathing just in case she needs to loosen some restraints or explain something. While she's at it she'll try a close sonic scan too, looking for nonobvious injuries. Depending on her Brute power Dragon might not get anything, but trying is free.
She won't distract the new cape with another question until she's oriented to the carrier. Once she's sitting, she'll go with, "What's the range on your glowing ball? What else does it do?"