One second Lorica is being swallowed by the sewer cape, the lion mouth opening far too wide, and the next she's being vomited out. A flood of stomach acid and chunky flesh is expelled with her, as well as what might be naked bodies.
"Ow, what the fuck!" she says. Wait, it shouldn't hurt, the anchor should be absorbing the damage - she scratches furiously at her skin - takes stock quickly of her surroundings to confirm that not very much time has passed, she was in fact eaten by this giant sewer monster after Evil Lucien For Some Reason lured her down here, this isn't a new body after another month -
- isn't a new -
- "What the fuck!"
"Idiot."
This is too many clones to handle if they go rogue, but she used up much of her mass on them. She won't be able to make more clones for some time, long enough that she might be found by the heroes. She was counting on these clones to provide troops for the coming conflict... She'll split the difference and kill half of them.
One of her legs lashes out to the nearest clone, coming down with enough force to pulverize the chest of many Brutes.
Nope. The bird's being squeezed quite tightly and even getting used to being almost impossible to injure has not made Lorica easily deterred by a bluejay beak at a bad angle. Climbing the ladder is difficult but she manages by wrapping her elbows around the rungs and going very slowly. She doesn't know what happens if she lets go of one.
"Perfect, thank you." She brings these back to the rest of the gang. They cooperate to put one of the shirts on Plumata so she doesn't have to hold onto a blanket with her encumbered hands and distribute the rest amongst themselves. And head off to - sigh - the nearest PRT office.
"Can you keep them that way as long as you're holding them?" asks the fuckton of bugs, as Taylor moves even more bugs towards the building.
To Miss Milita:
"We have Echidna pinned down and temporarily neutralized, if you want to help you can. If anyone tries to mess with us on this, on Tagg's orders or otherwise, I'll treat it as if they violated the Endbringer truce."
"Both - they've defected." The outpost shares enough connections with the rest of the PRT that they manage to act as a regular PRT operation in many respects, even if they do answer to the Undersiders ultimately. She's not enthusiastic about the concept, leaving in place ties to such a flawed system, even if it was her idea. She can't build peace without the PRT in the long run. A changed PRT anyways.
It takes under two minutes for the Undersiders to arrive, minus Tattletale.
"I'm glad you asked!" says Tattletale.
"First off, Labyrinth, a large target please - as we discussed on the way here."
The architecture around them warps, the pavement turning to cobblestones, a stone sphere 8 feet in diameter rising out of the ground.
"And now Flechette, will you shoot it?"
Flechette shoots an arrow into the sphere.
The sphere vanishes, a hollow void.
"Labrynth, you should be able to see other worlds..."
The quiet cape nods.
"Somewhere uninhabited please, where we can drop our bird nemesi off."
The void changes, becoming a portal to a forest, towering oak trees visible in the distance contrasting against the city landscape around them.
It's a lot for their parents to adjust to, even after the whole, dying, coming back in somebody else's body, thing.
There's not really room for all six of them in the house. They put on six different outfits - that's most of their clothes, Lorica has always been pretty on top of doing laundry once a week - and pack the rest of their stuff.
Tinker Lorica assigns herself the nickname "Sarcina" and liberates Rete and assigns it to bring all their tech to the house she has it rent with some of the remaining Jack Slash money. It also sends the PRT a courtesy email about this since they're So Concerned about Unmaintained Tinker Tech.
Anchor-power Lorica names herself Castra and, as the least squishy and least clumsy member of the group so far as they currently know, heads out - pity she left her motorcycle, she'll pick that up on the way back - to return the blankets and shirts to the lady who lent them.
"I don't hate capes and have no plans to poison any, much less one who sounds guaranteed to come back for revenge."
Her house is cozy if old, smelling of wood and freshly baking cookies. A staircase near the entrance leads to an upstairs presumably with bedrooms, and past that there's a kitchen with a small wooden table pressed against the wall. There are a few potted plants decorating the place, and a tall bookcase crammed into the kitchen filled with textbooks and a mix of historical and parahuman non-fiction.
"Mm. My parahuman psych class has a unit on instability of cape groups and they spend a bunch of time on all the different things the Wards and Protectorate do to discourage and defuse conflict between their members. They definitely try to give the impression that those groups are the only ones that manage to not fall apart due to infighting."
"I'm not especially good in groups of other people but I seem to have a really convenient instinct for dealing with groups of me! I didn't expect this to come up and don't know why I have it but there is a way it is natural to interact with five more of myself and it's awesome."
The Loricae buy a house. (They would just as soon not buy it from Tattletale, thanks, game night is not the same level of entanglement as major financial transactions and they haven't settled out the continent thing.) Sarcina colonizes the entire attic level as her workshop, claims all their tech from the PRT that she retained the rights to in the first place, and gets started on making a complete set of implants for everybody.
Going poof explodes her into a cloud, apparently! She takes up the entire house, spills out onto the street, and seeps into some neighboring houses as well.
She can sense everything the cloud is touching, and move it albeit very slowly.
If she wants to unpoof she can do so in any spot within her cloud-self, sucking it all back up into her normal form.
One of the two Loricae with more confusing powers can grant ... something? It's not clear what - none of the Loricae can tell that anything is happening except for the other mystery power Lorica, who can apparently sense that there's something being granted, and can also prevent it from being granted as well as changing the speed at which it stops working, whatever it is.
"I wish I knew what my thing did. I poke it sometimes, I think it's some kind of Trump thing because I can do it 'at' Plumata and this'un and also Castra for some reason even though her power doesn't affect people at all, but it doesn't do anything in reaction to Sarcina or Zephyr."
"In all seriousness his rate of kidnapping people is sufficient that I'd probably think it worthwhile to trade a few of his hostages for a definite killshot, but I will hold out for the best possible plan and would be surprised if it couldn't be pretty clean when we're probably all immune to him and nearly all his kids."
"So I could make you a whole suit but that's a substantial materials outlay and killing Jack Slash got me only a million dollars and I spent most of it on the house. Probably we're looking at earpieces and maybe lenses, do you think you can do contacts or do you want spectacles?"
"Contacts and earpiece. I can maybe do some kind of reactive armor that moves around on you but is never covering all of you at once. Possibly you should have something that can incapacitate you if you get hit by somebody's area-of-effect Mastery even if they can't notice you coming, you're not very dangerous to me but you could grab a gun or something."
Miss Militia and the Undersiders agree to an (unwritten) truce where the Protectorate won't proactively go after the Undersiders and will coordinate with them for major threats. Arresting an Undersider who is flagrantly committing a crime - and not in the middle of dealing with someone else who is doing the same - is still fair game.
Left unsaid is how this is more a description of what the Protectorate can actually manage to do in Brockton than it is an agreement they chose to make.
"I'll stare at you next," she says to the other Lorica, focusing on the booper for the moment.
"Huh, subtle."
Her power streams in with inferences, most of them about what the effect isn't, before flagging something weird about her how her brain is responding to her power usage.
"Oh, damn. It's blocking the downside of my power - it's barely doing anything now but if I ran at full tilt for a few hours I wouldn't feel the migraine. I think I'd still run out of juice though. I think this is your master immunity power?"