Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

Devon Island - or Tallurutit in Inuktitut language - was the largest uninhabited island in the world. Situated north of Canada, its surface area of over twenty thousand square miles made it two thirds the size of Ireland but unlike the greenest place on Earth it was a barren wasteland. In fact, with the exception of the polar oasis in Truelove Lowland, it was entirely barren; a field of jagged red-black rocks and permafrost sparsely covered by snow in the western half of the island, an even dome of ice most of a mile thick covering the eastern half. If not for the thick blue atmosphere and sparse cloud cover I could have believed I were back in the Martian ice caps.

Its surface and conditions resembled that of Mars so much - more than any other place on the planet - that several countries around the world had built research stations specifically for researching the conditions and preparing people for a future mission to the Red Planet. Despite this, the island still did not have any permanent population whatsoever and according to the information package we had been given any active science stations at the time had been evacuated for reasons both real and fabricated.

I'd studied that particular information package as well as anything I could find online for several subjective days. That along with my habitual constant use of Force Awareness led to the discovery of the first problem almost as soon as we reached the island's shores. As we flew over the Truelove Lowlands, several discrepancies between the information package, what my supersenses were picking up and what my eyes could see became evident. I wasn't the only one to notice them, though the kids had no way to see the real issue.

"Nice flowers," Cindy pointed out as we flew over a field of gold and silver petals. "I didn't know something that pretty could grow in these freezing conditions," she obliquely complained as she huddled and shivered, hands under her armpits."

"They normally can't; these aren't normal flowers," I told her drily. Unlike her and to a lesser extent Gabe, I had no problem with the temperature of two hundred and fifty Kelvin, a rather mild one for winter so far up into the arctic circle. I redirected our force-bubble transport towards the nearest patch of ground free of abnormal growth and had us land.

"This place sucks!" the teenage brunette huffed. "The one pretty thing we find in a rocky wasteland as far as the eye can see and it's some mutated magic crap. We should get back to the Osprey."

"Weren't you complaining that the Osprey was far too loud and far too slow?" I asked as I uprooted the closest golden flower with a forcefield and examined it both physically and with my senses. The golden color was due to a strange oily sheen coating the petals, a thin layer of viscous, honey-like liquid with golden flakes suspended in it. As in actual metallic gold, as far as my senses could tell. "Besides, we agreed to scout ahead before the camera crew would land. We wouldn't want them to get eaten by a Grue before they can film your public debut, would we?"

"Ugh, speak for yourself," Gabby muttered. Unlike Cindy, the Hispanic boy had dressed properly for the cold in multiple layers of insulating cloth, faux leather and fur in a suit designed to mimic northern Canadian styles. "I grew up in Mexico City: the last time it snowed was before I was born. I thought that base in Alaska we'd been hiding in was bad but this is far worse." He jumped in place repeatedly in an attempt to warm up until Cindy slapped him in the back of the head. "Hey! What was that for!?"

"Are you a sword-wizard or not?" she demanded after her patented eye-roll. "Make us a sword of fire so we can warm up already!"

"Oh, right," the boy muttered and blushed in embarrassment before a floating great-sword made up entirely of glowing hot molten metal appeared between the two teenagers.

"Idiot," Cindy huffed rather more affectionately than I'd been expecting and huddled next to Gabby, basking in the sudden warmth. "Hey Teach!" she suddenly called out. "Aren't you a Florida girl? How come you aren't freezing with the rest of us, especially with how... low-cut your costume is?" She glanced at my sleeveless, shoulderless top with obvious envy. "Is it some secret power? Could we learn it before our bits freeze and fall off?"

"Just natural awesomeness and self-confidence," I shot back while examining a silver flower. "Oh, and acclimation over time and exposure. Superhuman durability means we won't be hurt by the cold, not that we can't feel it. Our brains just need time to get used to what's normal for us, much like some people will happily swim in subzero temperatures while others think the sea's cold even in the summer." The flowers were identical down to the shape of the petals and the strange oily coating except for the metal flakes being silver in the second one. Pure metallic silver, which was obviously the result of magic as much as the gold was. Neither metal was abundant enough for the flowers to have drawn them in any significant quantity through the soil; they had to be creating them magically much like Liz did with her powers. Maybe if-

"This is a waste of our time," Mark suddenly spoke up. "There's nothing here but a bunch of useless plants. We should move ahead to the research sites and investigate the scientists' disappearance." The black boy had his usual scowl in full force and kept kicking at the flowerbed. Silver and gold flowers tore against his idle attacks, stone crumbled and gravel was launched dozens of feet away, but that was all his venting managed.

"Is it?" One eyebrow rose and my lips turned upwards in a challenging smirk. "Look around more carefully. Tell me what's wrong with this picture." Well, apart from the silver and gold production that in a simpler world would have made even the most clueless person drool at the sheer profit potential.

"What's wrong?" the boy snarled. "What's wrong is that we're freezing our asses off on a fool's errand. That we're pandering to the press when there's a hundred problems we should be handling. That we're playing with flowers in the most remote place on Earth when we should have been at least training, improving to be able to deal with supervillains, not doing... whatever this stupidity is!" He kicked at the flowerbed more forcefully this time, tearing a few dozen flowers at once. "Maybe Cindy is fine with sitting around and looking pretty but I'm not!"

"That's because you suck at it," the brunette shot back, stretching to show off her skintight pink catsuit with a Hello Kitty image and the legend '#1 Schrödinger's Cat' stretching over her chest in rainbow glitter. "All you wear is military fatigues, all you do is brood and read about guns, all you think about is training. When do you have fun?"

"Um guys..." Gabby tentatively muttered.

"The world was invaded by man-eating monsters, cultists and terrorists got superpowers, over a million people are already dead and all you think about is looking pretty," Mark sneered at Cindy. "We're at war, or did you miss the memo?"

"Oh excuse me for not wanting to become a brooding wind-up soldier," the girl shot back over her shoulder, faking more interest in the flowers than the guy she was arguing about. With her back turned, she worked into making a crown of flowers in silver and gold as if Mark's words were not worthy of her attention. "There," she said, wearing the crown primly. "A bit of cuteness. Now the trip is not a complete waste, exactly as you wanted."

"Guys!" Gabby interjected more forcefully but was ignored again.

"Since when did you care about anything other than being a bitch to everyone for no reason?" Mark spat back angrily. "Or did you forget the half dozen instructors you terrified, several hundred people you played malicious pranks to, hitting Gabby and I every day for over a month?"

"Well maybe if I hadn't been conscripted into the military whether I liked it or not, maybe if I wasn't treated like a bomb about to go off from the beginning, maybe if most of the people on base hadn't been uptight assholes obsessed with discipline I wouldn't have done any of that," the teenage brunette countered with equal vehemence. "Uptight assholes like you who wouldn't know fun if she danced naked before you."

Gabby blushed furiously, and from how Mark's face glowed in infrared and his blood rushed beneath his skin he was blushing too. There had to be a story there, because Cindy was exactly the sort of person both capable and willing to flash a bunch of soldiers and get away with it. It wasn't as if anyone on base could have stopped her before I came around, which begged the question; how had General Rinaker managed to conscript her? But that was a mystery for future-Maya to investigate, because things in this remote Canadian wasteland were heating up.

Dozens of root-like strands shot out of the flowerbed, complete with silver and gold blossoms, and wrapped around all three of the kids. Even Cindy got wrapped up in them despite her usually insurmountable elusiveness, probably because her argument with Mark had taken up the entirety of her attention. Had she subconsciously dismissed her other iterations by accident? Not even my senses could tell but I suspected that was the case because she didn't immediately flicker out of the mutated plants' grasp. All three teenagers had multiple strands wrapping around their limbs but Mark had more than twice as many as the other two, possibly because he'd been kicking the flowerbeds. Was that an indication of built-in instincts, rudimentary intelligence or pre-programmed response? I guess we'd find out.

"And that, kids, is why we pay attention during a wilderness mission to investigate suspicious disappearances," I told the three, making no move to get them out of the situation they had put themselves. I sat in mid-air instead, waiting to see how they would handle things.

xxxx

"And that, kids, is why we pay attention during a wilderness mission to investigate suspicious disappearances."

Stupid, stupid, stupid. How had she let the damn flora get a grip on her, Cindy wondered. Mark's "perfect little soldier" routine wasn't something new but for the first time in a good long while it had made her blood boil - figuratively at least. The dumbass should come off his high horse because he wasn't perfect any more than the rest of them. Soldiers did as they were told and kept their mouths shut, probably because they knew they did not know enough to say anything smart. Mark on the other hand thought he already knew everything and was always happy enough to say so to everyone who would listen. It was the second reason Cindy could not stand him, other than his enjoying the military life. Did he not realize they'd been strong-armed into working for the government?

She tried to split to more instances and only managed to flicker in the same space. With these mutant flowers wrapped around her limbs all the potential locations she could have been were all in the same spot, every single one of them tied up. Worse, the root-like tentacles were strong, stronger than steel. Physical strength was Cindy's weakest area by a fair margin and while individually the roots were no match for her, a dozen of them combined meant trouble. On the other hand, she didn't need to force her way out like some meathead.

The brunette split into as many different instances as possible under the circumstances. They all mostly occupied the same space but each and every one represented her if she struggled a little bit differently, if she was more or less lucky, if she stumbled into and tried out different ideas to get free. In the same moment the teenage girl took every possible different action, followed every potential timeline that branched from the same starting point at the same time.

In some instances she made a mistake, turned the wrong way in her struggles, lost a tiny bit of leverage and the roots got the upper hand. In others she slipped on the permafrost, or was tripped, or was distracted by a root poking her eye; the moment she fell down losing the struggle became a foregone conclusion as more roots reached and wrapped around her before she could get up. In some, the roots lucked into a winning strategy by wrapping around her neck. With her hands indisposed, nothing preventing that one strand from squeezing down, she weakened quickly; even superhuman constitution would eventually succumb to being choked. All those instances she dismissed the moment it became clear there would be no winning outcome.

Those, however, were far from the only possibilities. With her on even footing with the mutant flowers, the majority of instances had them on even footing. A minor disadvantage here, a minor advantage there, but nothing special in and of themselves. The actual benefit of having many inconclusive repetitions of the same events was information; each Cindy had her own senses, her own brain, could make her own observations and conclusions but all of them shared what any one of them knew. It took her barely a second to understand how the plants fought, another to map the patterns to their reactions and which of them had the greatest impact in the struggle one way or another. Only half a second more to combine everything into plans because even restrained she had enough instances their collective brain power outmatched a supercomputer.

This was where the third type of possibilities came in. Instances where she happened to pull just right for a strand to miss, for an arm or a leg to loosen the flowers' hold just a little. Others where different mutant flowers got in each other's way, got tangled up, or just didn't do as well as they could have. Instances where luck was on her side and many of their attacks failed. In theory, with enough repetitions it was possible for every attack to miss or fail against a given Cindy, or all of a Cindy's efforts to succeed. In practice, there was only so far she could stretch her power. Shoot a target at random at a thousand feet while blindfolded? Done. Shoot the gun at an angle so it would bounce off a bird's beak two miles up, drop and ricochet off a soldier's helmet, go through the window and splash into the General's coffee while she had the alibi of being off base? She'd tried repeatedly; no dice.

But as long as she could gain any advantage at all, it was enough. She deleted instances where her struggles were going nowhere and then continued from instances where she had succeeded, splitting more possibilities for the next step. First step, a root missed. Second step, an arm got a bit loose. Third step, she leveraged prior successes to slip out of a wristlock. Fourth step, her foot twisted enough to tear one of the smaller roots. This was made vastly easier when she knew how the plants would react and had planned the steps in advance through her prior observations. Little by little she was getting free and the plants, assuming they had a brain at all, would not see how it was done beyond her seeming incredibly lucky and implausibly competent.

She'd get out of this and then kick Mark in his everywhere for getting them caught.

xxxx

"And that, kids, is why we pay attention during a wilderness mission to investigate suspicious disappearances."

What a bitch, she wasn't even helping them deal with the attack...

...no, no, she was right. Arguing with both their leader and among themselves in the middle of a mission was a huge error of judgement and now they were suffering the consequences. Mark could admit as much if only in the privacy of his own thoughts. And just in case some mind reader or remote observer had access to them anyway, fuck off assholes! Brains were private property!

He pulled his right arm with all his strength, some of the alien flowers snapping or losing their grip but more crawling up at him from all over the flowerbed. Well, right or wrong he was in a right pickle. Presumably Captain Barbie - who did not hold any actual military rank whatsoever - was using this relatively non-lethal incident as a teaching moment and to evaluate their performance and would intervene if things got much worse, so there was no reason to panic. As soon as they either passed or failed the test she could get them out in literally zero time, so why was he having a hard time convincing his body to stop flailing and think clearly? He should focus. It was just one more training exercise, easily solvable as long as he maintained control.

Resolution made, he banished Cindy from his mind and all her antics. His impotent fury every time he got pranked, or tripped, or pushed for no reason whatsoever with zero evidence or witnesses it had actually happened. His anger at the lost time every time his books and personal effects had their positions changed, his shoelaces tied together or removed, his notes turned into paper airplanes during lectures. His rage that despite being stronger, tougher and faster, despite having an offensively overwhelming power, he had never managed to lay a single finger on the vanishing annoyance either during practice matches or in the few ambushes he had tried during the early days of their time together. OK, the bitch didn't show one iota of discipline or interest in serving her country. Did she have to take it out on the rest of them?

With a roar and tapping into the horsepower of three locomotives he ripped his way out of the plants' grip... then promptly slipped, fell face-first to the ground and was mobbed by more plants before he could do anything else. Right, locomotives moved on rails, not broken rock crawling over with bullshit alien flowers. He tried to calm down and think things through before he made the situation any worse for himself.

OK, those alien roots were tough. In retrospect he should have noticed the first time he kicked them without the whole flowerbed exploding instead with only a couple of them getting torn up like normal flowers getting kicked by a normal person. Was that what Wennefer had meant when he told him to find what was wrong with the picture? If so, he'd totally missed it. Super-strength was still new to him, he was not used to how the world reacted to his actions, let alone how it should react and what that said about his surroundings. Being shown how short-sighted and oblivious he was, Mark resolved to do more practical training in the future. But to do that he first needed to get out of this Charlie Foxtrot.

Mimicking airborne platforms was right out. Most of them had next to zero mobility or firepower on the ground and while he could use them in weapons combinations he had never actually tested them in such situations and didn't know if their drawbacks would negatively affect him in this terrain. He really needed to make more practical tests with the options he already had instead of just memorizing more vehicles to mimic, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty. That his superhuman eyesight was better than that was just irony adding insult to injury.

Similarly, sea vehicles would not work well. Not only might they suffer similar issues with airborne platforms, but Mark's power didn't give him access to all ships, or even most. His mass limit for mimicry was low enough that the vast majority of warships was right out. What was left was patrol boats, the smaller submarines and destroyers and various civilian vessels... which would not amount to much. Oh, they'd still add their significant mass and firepower to any combination, but with zero additional mobility they weren't efficient choices unless all he wanted to do was tank the damage and wait to be rescued. Screw that bullshit!

That left land vehicles. Trains were, as he had seen, problematic. Their horsepower still added to his strength which would let him burst out of the alien plants easily enough, but they actually made his mobility and balance worse since he was nowhere near any train tracks. On the other hand, if he could find a sufficiently stable vehicle to counteract that issue, that extra mass and horsepower should help.

Whatever he decided to do he had to do it fast; the flowers had completely tied down his arms and legs and now were wrapping around his torso, squeezing hard enough that he was beginning to hurt. Immediately, he shifted two slots to mimic GT1s, a Russian train engine that was the most powerful non-electric locomotive ever produced. With over eleven thousand horsepower and two hundred and twenty thousand pounds tractive force added to his own strength per engine, suddenly all the plants on him felt a hell of a lot more brittle. The added durability of a little over seven hundred tons of bulky steel construction did not hurt either.

He flailed around, tearing through the plants easily enough. His balance and overall stability had become bad enough though that he couldn't actually stand. That called for the trusty old M1A2 Abrams tank. Powerful treads for good traction, a wide and low-profile hull for stability... he could move again! With the crack of shattering rock he burst out of the alien roots' grip, then sprayed them with mimicked machine gun fire and explosive shells from a hundred and twenty millimeter gun... which didn't do much against a field of flowers tougher than steel and loose and flexible like a fishing net. The conjured bullets actually bounced!

Well then, how about something different? He dropped one of the locomotives, feeling the now wildly attacking plants getting relatively stronger as he lost access to its immensely powerful engine. But then it was replaced by the M67A2 "Zippo", the last purposefully designed flamethrower tank in US service. A torrent of napalm shot out at the flowerbed as Mark aimed to obliterate that annoying eyesore.

The flowers went mad. Instead of burning up like kindling as he'd expected, they resisted the red-hot flames that clung to them. Silver and gold blossoms shone like lightbulbs as the entire flowerbed woke up. Where before only the alien plants in the group's immediate vicinity had attacked them, his use of incendiaries made the soil for at least half a mile boil and writhe as tens of thousands of square yards of alien vegetation crawled towards the source of the attacks at the speed of a fast jog.

Eyes going wide, the teenage super frantically hacked at all the tendrils that kept attacking him. They needed to get free right now! If a few dozen tendrils were giving them trouble, the entire tide that had woken up would bury them via sheer mass alone.

Their only chance was to get airborne in the next few seconds...

xxxx

"And that, kids, is why we pay attention during a wilderness mission to investigate suspicious disappearances."

Unlike his two teammates, Gabby had not been lost in their usual arguments. They'd been repeating the same song and dance since almost the first time they'd been put in the same room and out in the wilderness wasn't the time to hash out arguments that wouldn't, couldn't be resolved any time soon. Besides, things had been getting better since Maya had turned up. A super that not only had joined with the military but actually fought in battles before was someone Mark would listen to despite her dressing like a pin-up model. A super that could take all of them in a fight with absurd ease and had an irreverent, independent streak as wide as the Atlantic was someone Cindy could respect - even look up to if Gabby was any judge of character. With the two worst-clashing members of the team opening up and behaving to a point, things had been actually improving.

As for Gabby himself, he'd always gone with the flow. Said flow getting towards his team actually becoming a team was something he could get behind. Maybe, just maybe, after many trials together, lots of talking and maybe a bit of therapy they could possibly be friends? It would be nice to have some, after everything that had happened. He did not regret getting powers - being a superhero was totally awesome - but they could be so very isolating. Not just being different because he could do things others did not, but the physical changes. Normal people didn't, couldn't understand.

But for now, flowers. Even a split-second's delay had let whatever alien, mutant, magical growth this was get its tentacles on him - because Gabby was not fooled. For all the pretty flowers, their innocuous plant-like nature, their deceptively calm initial appearance Gabby knew tentacles when he saw them. All those hours on the internet were finally paying out now that he was a mighty Defender of the Earth... or at least a trainee to eventually achieve that dream.

Gabby might not be the strongest of supers, he might not have broken powers that made him untouchable, but unfortunately for the plants he already had a magic sword out and a flaming one at that. With a mental command, he directed the magical weapon towards the nearest tentacle holding him down. The edge of fire bit down and barely severed a single strand. Not enough. He needed to make the blade more powerful. Instead of struggling towards freedom physically, he just poured more of his power into the construct. Some experimentation after the wraith debacle had revealed that he didn't need to make his swords larger in order to make them more powerful. It was just harder to push the magic into them but with enough motivation...

More intrusive tentacles crawled up his limbs; he felt more than sufficiently motivated.

The magic sword turned from fire to light, a harsh white radiance that was painful to look at. Its next swing sliced through a whole bunch of tentacles, leaving the severed edges sizzling as they practically melted. He quickly directed it to hack all the grabby alien/demon things he found apart even as he poured more and more power into the weapon. While having multiple weapons might let him strike at many targets at once, splitting both his power and attention like that wasted too much of both. Better to have a single powerful weapon he knew would be effective and keep a small amount of power in reserve for utility and emergencies. By the time he got out of the initial entrapment the sword looked more like a silver thunderbolt than anything else.

Looking around, the Hispanic boy found out he'd not been the first to make his escape. While Mark frantically blasted the rapidly increasing number of tentacles assailing them even as he tried to free his legs, Cindy had somehow completely escaped her own bonds and was even now dancing and contorting her way through an increasing number of attempts to grab her again, managing to remain completely untouched.

Gabe... just watched. In his defense, the brunette was very pretty as all supers tended to be and cut an alluring figure in that tight bodysuit. He was a teenage boy, damn it! When such a spectacle was freely offered, he was contractually obligated to watch or forever turn in his bro card. His magic sword could defend him automatically for a few seconds so no harm do-

"Ouch!"

A rock somehow struck Gabe's forehead with such force that not only did he feel it, it was going to leave quite the bruise too, superhuman durability or no. He looked around for the source of the unlikely projectile; what he saw made his heart beat like a drum in terror. An enormous wave of alien tentacles taller than a three-floor house and as fast as a Marathon runner was rapidly approaching from all around them. If they did not leave immediately they were all kinds of screwed and not in a fun way.

He looked around again, taking in all details and evaluating all avenues of escape. Not many presented themselves; all he could think was to fly out of here. Except... swallowing a hell of a lot of nerves, Gabe made a split-second decision. He immediately started creating a second blade enchanted for unrestrained movement and flight, slamming all his available power into it. At the same time he made his way towards the one possibility he could see.

"Cindy, use this!" he shouted to be overhead over the roar of the alien tentacle tidal wave and Mark's rapid fire high explosives. The moment the girl noticed him, he thrust the sword's handle in her direction and hoped this worked.

The brunette understood his intent instantly and perfectly. She grabbed the sword's handle... then immediately dropped it with a hiss and an angry glare in his direction. Wha- oh, the handle had to be a bazillion degrees with how much power he'd poured into the blade.

"Sorry! Sorry! My mistake!" he placated the understandably vexed girl before one of her legion of copies could invisibly kick him between the legs, or something. Then he grabbed the last dregs of his power and added a freezing effect to the sword's hilt. The effort left him gasping, the only reason he hadn't been grabbed by the tentacles again were both his swords rapidly rotating around him and slicing anything that tried apart. "It should be OK to use now."

Giving him an unimpressed look, Cindy somehow grabbed and pulled the sword out of its rapid rotation with the same ease and swiftness she'd managed to still avoid all attacks despite getting distracted by the sword burning her. Then the girl smiled widely, raised the weapon into the air... and every single alien tentacle in a rapidly widening ring fell apart into multiple sizzling, blackened pieces.

The ring of hacked apart tentacles included Mark a split second later, freeing the black boy to open up with his powers unimpeded. Instead of standing his ground and fighting as Gabby had expected him to do, Mark immediately rose to the air.

His cry of "Fly! Fly damn it!" was barely audible over the roar of the titanic tentacle tide, now only fifty yards away and looming taller than most residential buildings.

Shaking in terror, Gabby bit his lip hard enough to draw blood, put one hand around Cindy's waist and with his other gripped the handle of his flying sword so tightly his fingers hurt. Less than a heartbeat later, his right arm was almost dislocated as the magical implement pulled the two of them up faster than a missile. They cleared the edge of the alien tide with only a few yards to spare, an infinitesimal fraction of a second separating freedom from being buried alive and... suffering whatever alien tentacles did to people.

"OK, apology accepted," a voice like spun crystal rang next to his ear some undefinable span of time later, pulling him out of his shock.

He blinked, looked around, found a heart-shaped face with laughing hazel eyes, red lips stretched in a vulpine grin and framed by silken brown locks dancing in the wind. Oh, it was Cindy. They'd both miraculously survived... and he was still carrying her by the waist. Well... he hadn't been stabbed yet, so all was well?

"Cat got your tongue?" she demanded in her usual, familiar tone then confused him by sounding serious and... actually grateful? "Thanks for the save, too."

"..."

"Ah, you're still in shock." She nodded as if that explained everything - no it fucking didn't! - then turned towards the third member of their team. "HEY DUMBASS!" she shouted so loudly it was like she was speaking with a thousand voices. Given her powers, she probably was.

"What?" Mark demanded with his usual scowl. At least some things were consistent.

"Aren't you gonna blast the plants with some heavy ordnance now that we're out of the blast radius?" she asked, pointing at the still writhing mound of alien biomass trying futilely to reach them from the ground. "We don't have all day! This isn't even our actual mission!"

"Screw you, Cindy!" Mark shouted back.

"Only in your dreams, Soldier Boy!" the brunette retorted and her again familiar mannerisms calmed down some of Gabby's utter mortification. His face felt so warm and close to exploding he had to look like a fucking tomato; there's no way anybody would possibly miss it, not from practically on top of him. He... he wanted to disappear... except he couldn't. Cindy could not fly. If he let her go not only would she immediately notice and know why it had happened, she'd also drop into the alien tentacles... and nobody deserved that. The only option was... was... to pretend nothing was happening at all?

Grumbling, Mark followed Cindy's advice and unloaded a huge amount of imitated bombs into the blindly waiting alien mass. Hundreds of explosions, each one powerful enough to level a good sized building, blasted the thing apart in less than half a minute. Then its remains were drowned in a literal lake of napalm. They had... they had actually won!

Good. Now they could land and he could flee somewhere else, somewhere where Cindy wouldn't find him for at least until the end of the year. His life probably depended on it - maybe he should create a teleportation sword?

"Great!" a woman's voice shouted from just behind their backs, making all three of them jump in mid-air. Gabby barely managed to hold on to a momentarily flickering Cindy and almost certainly only because the girl let him. "You kids handled your first real ambush reasonably well," Maya told them with satisfaction as they hovered. None of them had noticed her arrival - or so Gabby assumed from his teammates' expressions. In fact, he did not remember even seeing her during their very brief, very intense battle.

"However, you did do a number of mistakes," the amazonian blonde added and started explaining every mistake they made then and there. NO!!! Instead of quietly fleeing, Gabby would have to listen to all his blunders being exposed to the others immediately...

...and he was still holding on to Cindy with the girl showing no signs of wanting to leave.