Shadow Stalker materialized behind Trickster, catching him around the throat in a headlock. 

Nice! But try not to let him see your arm.

She used one foot to kick his feet out from under him, and then forced him face first into the water.

Excellent. Looks like we might have a partial capture here, if this sticks.

Kid Win hesitated.  Help her or help Vista?

I think you’d be better fit to helping Vista.

Vista.  Shadow Stalker would say she could handle herself.  Made a point of trying to.

That too.

He fired more shots to free Vista, missing the wires one or two times.  The heroine, for her part, focused on angling the wall beneath her to allow herself to slide down instead of falling the full distance.

Sweet.

Ballistic shot Shadow Stalker, driving her back.  The attack had left a gaping hole just below her heart, the edges wispy.

Welp. Here’s hoping she can just fill that back in.

The gap closed, but the attack had separated her from Trickster, and hurt her badly enough that she crumpled to the ground, a hand to her chest.

Looks like it’s a bit of both yes and no on that.

The balance of the fight had abruptly shifted.  Clockblocker, Flechette and Vista were where the three Travelers had been, and vice versa.

Whoop.

You know what? I really, really like Trickster’s power.

“Nuh uh uh, kiddo,” Trickster spoke, as the gap in the wall began closing behind his group, “Up you go.”

What are you going to do now?

Nice try, at least, Vista.

The flayed corpse appeared in Vista’s position.

Well shit. At least she can make the fall shorter for herself.

No!  Kid Win turned, saw Vista on the wall.  She’d gotten tangled in the loops of wire that had been holding the corpse up.

Huh. Seems Trickster’s getting lucky.

The metal wire was coiled around a shattered part of the wall, and more than one wire had caught around her neck.  Another looping of wire bound her body, one of her arms caught against her side.

Well, she’s stuck.

She struggled to pull at the wire on her neck with her free hand, but it was little help.  The wire pulled so tightly against her throat that Kid Win feared it would cut her skin.

Ouch.

“Trickster!” Sundancer cried out, horrified.

Apparently Kid’s not the only one who doesn’t like this.

Is this the source of those problems we’ve seen alluded to between Trickster and Sundancer? That he’s a bit crueler than she appreciates?

“Just run!” was the villain’s only reply.  The three villains started running, leaving the building behind, their footsteps sloshing and splashing.

Well, this is looking more and more like a Traveler victory.

Kid Win raised his laser pistol, aimed carefully, then fired, landing the shot a half-foot to the right of Vista’s throat.  The wires heated and split, freeing her, and she dropped a foot before catching on more wires.

Nice shot!

Nothing dangerous, this time, but it was a fair distance to fall and one slip could see her getting cut on the wire, strangled or cracking her head open as she fell.

Ouch, yeah.

Maybe if she has enough fine control of the power, Vista can reduce the distance to the floor and increase the distance between her body and each piece of wire?

Dumb.  He regretted it the second his finger left the trigger.

Welp. Who’s it gonna hit, you or someone else?

As he predicted, he found himself somewhere else in the blink of an eye, and the impact of his own gunfire slammed into his back, intensely hot.

Oof. Better hope what happened earlier was a result of “Genesis”’s “biology” and not a malfunctioning gun, eh, Kid?

He threw himself to the ground at the base of the building, where water pooled, rolling so his back was submerged.

Good call.

Stop, drop and roll!

It’s not lethal, can’t do any permanent harm, you had it vetted, tested on pig meat.

At least it’s not the Tiro Finale.

“The water’s going to wash away the evidence if you don’t let us go and hurry to check on the bodies,” Trickster spoke.

That’s a good point, honestly.

“Crime scene techs can’t get here in time with the roads like they are,” Weld spoke.  “And we’re not allowed to touch the evidence anyways.  Rules.”

Fair enough. Let’s hope the other crime scenes have ceilings.

“Rules?  You shouldn’t sweat those things so much,” Trickster chuckled, “Here, I’ll help you out.”

Oh man, is he about to teleport one of the corpses down to Weld?

And yeah, I kind of agree with Trickster here. Securing the evidence is more important than waiting for the right people to do it when those people can’t make it in time anyway.

Weld disappeared, and the burned corpse flopped to the ground.

Close enough.

“Shit!” Clockblocker shouted, running forward.

Weld dropped from the wall for the second time in a matter of minutes as the restraints intended for the woman’s corpse tore free of the concrete.

So he did get stuck in the restraints, but because of his weight, the wall couldn’t support him. Alright.

Vista reshaped the wall to ease his descent.  Kid Win raised his laser rifle to fire at Trickster.

I can’t help but imagine her shaping the wall into a fun slide under Weld.

That’s her power, he reminded himself, you didn’t kill her.

I guess they or other PRT employees have fought her enough that they know she can “come back” from seemingly fatal attacks.

But his gun had done a surprising amount of damage.  Was it some interaction with how she pulled her new shapes together?  A specific wavelength, a weakness to lasers?

Hehe. Perhaps… perhaps not… 😉

He wasn’t about to complain.  He wheeled around, fired on the other villains.

I’m not sure that’s the greatest thing to be doing after getting surprised like that, but at least it’s presumably not going to do more than normal against the others.

An injured Ballistic opened fire on Vista, discharging a series of pieces of rubble at an angle.  It struck the ground just in front of the girl and fallout from the impacts showered her.  Each shot drove her back further, buying him a chance to limp to Sundancer’s side.

Hm.

He touched the darts that were fixing her to the wall, sending them flying into Weld’s face.

…nice touch. No pun intended.

I’m honestly not entirely sure which side I’m rooting for here.

Kid Win unslung his laser rifle and fired at the villainess.  His first shot grazed her, as one flap of her wings carried her higher into the air, but the next two hit the mark.

Pew pew!

I’MMA FIRIN’ MAH no

One struck her in the shoulder, leaving a hole large enough to fit his hand through, the other struck her in the side of the head, doing a similar amount of damage.

When she takes this kind of damage without dying, it might be time to reevaluate whether this person is actually a person.

Genesis dropped from the sky, exploded into a mess of dark smoke and pebbles as she struck the ground.

Ah, fair enough.

Trickster, this seems like a great time to go into theatrical mode and play up how Kid Win just killed your oh so precious teammate.

Feeling a moment’s panic, he checked the settings on his gun.  Normal levels, no anomalies.  It could heat metal and other inorganic materials, cut through more fragile materials, but against a person, it wouldn’t do more than hurt and maybe leave the mildest kind of burn.

That’s another fair reason to start wondering if that was actually a person or not.

Or to start wondering if you really fucked up when making that gun.

Surely Trickster would want the latter.

Then the wall moved beneath his hand, and he heard Clockblocker shout, “Get down, Kid!”

He let himself fall, simultaneously realizing he had been leaning against Genesis, in her gargoyle-like form.

Oh jeez. Did Clockblocker just try to tag her, only to get swapped with Kid?

Weld slammed into the villainess, his left hand in the form of a heavy miner’s pick.  It did a surprising amount of damage, but she didn’t seem to care.

Ooh, nice.

And yeah, she probably doesn’t care because that isn’t actually her. Tattle mentioned that one of her projections had been blown up and “she” had come back soon after in a different form.

She gripped Weld around the face with a claw, raked his chest twice with criss-crossing slashes of her other hand, leaving deep gouges in the metal.

Ouch.

The same noxious black smoke that she had been breathing began to billow out of the hole the pick had made in her chest.

Great, another outlet for it.

So is that smoke what these projections are mainly made out of on the inside?

Clockblocker charged, but Genesis shoved Weld so the two heroes stumbled into one another, delaying them long enough for her to leap into the air.  She beat her wings to keep herself aloft and out of reach.

Damn.

Flechette threw a handful of darts at Sundancer, pinning the girl against the wall.  

Nice. Doesn’t stop her from moving her mini sun around, but nice.

Somehow Flechette had avoided Trickster’s attention.  How?  Kid Win turned to look, saw that she was standing so her body blocked Trickster’s line of sight to both the darts and his teammate.

Niiice. He can’t swap what he can’t see, so the trick is to make him not see what he needs to swap!

Better keep that in mind for later, Grue. Just in case.

So he can only teleport what he sees?

Oh, you didn’t know that.

I think I might’ve gotten too used to having Tattletale around.

So did Flechette figure that out or did she just get lucky?

Kid Win moved to mimic Flechette’s technique, running to a position where he would be between the injured Ballistic and Trickster.  He cocked his spark pistol.

Nice.

He was nearly lined up for his shot when his gun disappeared from his hand, an awkwardly sized piece of wood taking its place.

Damn. I guess Trickster figured out what he was doing, swapped himself with someone who would be able to see the gun, and then swapped the gun.

A second later, his mask and visor cracked against a hard surface.

Uh-oh. Did Trickster just teleport Kid?

He had to grip the wall to steady himself and keep from falling.  He’d been teleported.

Yep.