Amaranthine

Cait held Kennedy tight in her grip, feeling an odd sense of loss as her wings fell away. Then a very real sense of herself falling away without their support.

She did the only thing she felt she could, reaching out one hand and doing a series of sonic jabs towards the Council Coulumn. She picked up speed, hoping that this building wasn’t fortified enough to deal with her.

She was half lucky.

Cait slammed into a window fist first, and that fist went through, halfway to the elbow. And there it stopped.

“Fuck!”, Cait cursed, locking her arm and settling in. “Hey guys? Gonna need a pickup…”

A few minutes later, with some help from Gwyn, Cait and Kennedy were much safer, but Cait was no less embarrassed.

They’d laid Kennedy down in their bed in the apartment, but the rest had continued to the Council Chamber, eager to touch base with city leadership about Willow’s observations.

“Sorry about the new hole,” Cait said, scratching at the back of her neck. Zebrowski just waved her off.

“Part of the deal, doing business with superhumans. The glass is self-repairing anyway, a relic from when we still lived up to this city’s name,” he explained. “I am far more concerned with what Willow has been filling us in on.”

The witch stood on the periphery of the chamber, glow of her eyes reflected in the glass as she scanned the city.

“There are loci of power in the city,” she said, seeming to focus on things only she could see. “There are far too many energies flying around for me to say what they are, but I can see where. And that they are large.”

“Yeah, no magic sigils or anything floating about giving you clues?” Cait asked, walking over to join her and trying to press her vision through the veil. It didn’t work. Though if tonight had been any indication, perhaps if Kennedy were linked up to Willow, it would have.

Gonna have to watch out for that. Extra powers kick ass, but knocking Kennedy out in the middle of a fight is unacceptable.

“Nothing quite so useful,” Willow said with a dejected shake of her head, “and to be frank I’d be surprised if there were. The group the Council is hunting has stayed below ground for years, they must have learned some degree of caution.”

“Sooooo what do we do?” asked Qi, joining them at the window. Like Cait, she scanned a city that looked much the same as it had the night before, save for the rainbow tint of the Wave.

“Impish,” Willow said, tearing her gaze from the city and walking back towards the desk. “Could you pull up one of those maps? I’d like to mark the locations I’m seeing as confluences.”

The small woman did as asked, a 3-D representation of Technocago shimmering to life in the center of the room. Willow walked through it, touching three spots. None of them were far by superhero standards, but Cait didn’t know the city well enough to put a name to any of them. Willow turned her attention to Chairman Zebrowski.

“I assume you all have an active feed of disturbance reports during a wave? Could you overlay that on top of this?” She asked, and Zebrowski inclined his head, complying. Immediately, spots of yellow peppered the map, showing the city was currently anything but calm.

Around two of the three red dots, those yellow dots condensed almost to a perfect circle. Impish frowned, gestured, and a few of those dots expanded, showing pictures, or transcripts of emergency calls.

At a dot near Navy Pier, a hulk had risen out of Lake Michigan, shards of broken ships crushed together over a gargantuan body of muck. It was a Guardian level threat to be sure, and Cait felt herself twitch towards the exit.

Another picture stayed her hand, massive defense guns mounted on the lakeside opening up on the hulk at the command of a familiar duster-clad figure.

“We gotta get those things up and running again,” Gwyn muttered, “None of the defense infrastructure around here fucking works without Watchdog around to animate it.”

Ooookayyy, so that dude was not just a joke. Good to know.

The other active dot expanded to show what Cait could best categorize as a ‘flesh beast’, almost slime like but with too many limbs and faces to really qualify. Half of those faces were currently vomiting, and the other half were being sandblasted away as Eyebite and Dust-Devil set about the grim work of putting what-or-whoever that thing had been down.

That just left one dot, and Cait was smart enough to know what Willow had been thinking here. There were a few splashes of yellow around it, but nothing that made it seem like a locus of activity. Whatever was happening here, it wasn’t something the public was concerned with. That didn’t necessarily mean it was a magical coven doing some dark magical working, using the Wave as fuel in secret, but it was a hell of a lot more likely to be that than the highly visible threats taking place in the other loci of Wave power.

“Willow, do you think Siobhan could get Kennedy up and moving again?” Cait asked. “I’d rather not go charging at some wizards without as many of our own as we can muster.”

Willow grimaced, dashing Cait’s hopes. “Siobhan works on the body, not the soul, and it’s like I explained to you last time-”

“Yeah, yeah, big soul, small hole, I get it, fuck. Well, guess we’re gonna have to do without our goth mascot on this one folks,” Cait announced, eyeing up Qi. “Sexy Smaug, you’ll have to do.”

“Me!?” Qi complained, waving at Breastman, “What about him?”

-I’M THE HEARTTHROB-

“He’s the heartthrob Qi, everyone knows that,” Cait smirked, catching an approving tentacle low against her palm. She focused her attention back on Zebrowski. “We went in a little half-cocked against Anarky,” She admitted, gesturing to the hologram. “Any info you can give us on the Coven we’re looking for?”

“Very little,” Impish answered for him, pulling up an image of a wizened old man who could have graced the cover of any number of tabletop RPG source books. “Last we knew, this man, Zeb Hawthorn, was their leader. Not a typical Altered, but you can think of him as a Meta-Brain for dark magic. As I’m sure Willow could tell you, that makes him tough to categorize.”

“Actually, it makes him very easy,” Willow said, glaring at the image, “He’s a contemptible Warlock, but it does make it extremely difficult to tell what he will be able to do.”

“Uh, right,” Impish continued, “and the same goes for his congregation. We never had a good count on their membership, and its been years since they were really active. We simply don’t know what you’ll be heading in to.”

-SO CAIT FIRST, LIKE USUAL-

“Cait first,” Qi agreed, nodding sagely, a sentiment and motion echoed by Willow, and then Gwyn.

“How about the neighborhood?” Cait asked. Dealing with a magic group that wasn’t necessarily openly hostile seemed like an excellent breeding ground for a cult.

“Cabrini Green wasn’t a nice place before the waves, but since they began and the resulting population crash, they’ve been all but deserted. That means a couple of things; the people there are there on purpose, and they want to separate themselves from others. While they might not be hostile, I’d advise against trying to make friends,” she said.

“Noted,” Cait said. “Willow? We’ve never really fought magicians before, any generalities for us to know?”

“Well,” Willow began, looking thoughtful as she ran her eyes over the team, “it may actually end up being quite a good matchup. You should be immune to any damaging spells of course, but Qi’s draconic lineage will give her massive resistances to magic of all kinds, I should think. Breastman is too difficult to categorize for many spells that rely on specificity to work, and I am warded to the fuck-ing nines. My main advice would be to treat this like you did the musclemen we just fought; hard, fast, and highly lethal. These people may well be looking like a big bunch of cosplay nerds, but each one could be capable of things beyond your imagination.

“I’m coming too,” Gwyn announced, “magic and machines not mixing goes both ways, and you guys lack flexibility without Kennedy. Plus, I missed B-Man so much this evening I could die, Lira’s snaps made me jealous as hell.”

-I WASN’T TOUCHING HER!-

“Oh I know, and that’s why you have all your tentacles,” Gwyn said with a smile as sinister as it was sweet, then headed for the elevator. She beckoned behind her, grinning as her casual outfit derezzed into a sort of combat-labcoat Cait suspected she’d been working on for awhile. “Now c’mon. Let’s go Hammer some Witches.”