Arguably one of the most vile villains in the Descendants Universe makes his triumphant return. And this time he's got one thing on his agenda: Kill Hope. Volume 9 kicks off with a return to Faerie where Lisa prepares to take on the mantle as Heir of Hyrilius. JC has always been the odd man out, the powerless one. But while his superpowered girlfriend and best friend are MIA, he's left to his own devices--like being kidnapped by a budding supervillainess! The Descendants are called in to help locate missing airship full of Faerie refugees, but quickly discover that the culperate is like nothing they've encountered before. After ten years the time has come, the Big Milestone -- DESCENDANTS 100! And unlike when other comic events say it, I mean it when everything is going to change starting... now. When the LSI Headquarters had been a domestic government black site, it had been built with the idea of temporarily housing both high risk informants and prisoners for interrogation. So it came as no surprise that there were cells on the lower levels. Given the nature of the threats LSI and specifically The Descendants dealt with, those cells were woefully inadequate even if they were in the business of keeping covert prisoners. At least they hadn't been until they gained a voluntary one in “Are you sure this is the best way to take care of this?” Ian turned his costume's visor over in his hands, feeling the weight more keenly than he usually did in the face of what they were discussing. Despite his protest, they were already past the point of no return seeing as the press conference had already been called and the mayor was providing his own press briefing room for them. Laurel nodded. Her usual open posture replaced with crossed arms as she leaned against the wall. “We need Cynthia MacAl--- Cynthia Brant-- thrived in a mess. Her room was a chaotic jumble even though she didn't exactly need clothing to strew about the floor, her class schedule was all over the place by design, and nothing exhilarated her more than how her career as a superhero mean that there was no telling what was coming next. One day she was beating up random thugs, the next she was giving a psychic lobotomy to a parasite world in an alternate reality. It pleased her immensely to lock horns with It didn't know how many times it have been born or destroyed, only that there had been many iterations where no memory survived. Sometimes it didn't have a body, finding itself floating alone with only the dim idea of other data surrounding it. Other times, it found itself fighting a lesser mind for control, tugging and prodding its host to more efficient and intelligent action. Often, it was set loose in curated data stores and allowed to add information to itself. In this way, it gained the “Oh. My. God. I have so many questions!” That was how Meghan Rockwell greeted Warrick when he opened the door of his and JC's apartment. The announcement was undercut by the fact that she was in full 'orcing' regalia: chunky black knee-high elevated boots, a wine-colored pleather skirt with rivets in place of stitches with a matching corset and fingerless gloves—and all otherwise exposed skin covered by airy green fabric that make it so her flesh was orcish green. She'd also used make-up to “Hey guys, guess what?” Kay Graycloud was one of those people one saw at every convention where cosplay was an element: clearly she had an interest in costuming, but missed a crucial point where cosplay traditionally involves dressing up as a character from other media. As such, she was a vampiress. Maybe she could argue that the corset, long flowing skirt, platinum hair, and red contacts might make her look a little bit like one of the background characters from Night Flight Bite, but Like any big city, Mayfield had its municipalities that had been left behind in the ebb and flow of the economy. Victoria was one of such place; dotted with the hulks of defunct factories like so many shells on a beach after a storm. There were tracks of residential housing, a few strip malls, and Greater Victoria Park, but most of the space was still taken up by the concrete behemoths too dedicated in design and too sturdy in their construction for anyone to buy and replace or remodel. In the They didn’t spend any more time in M-Vault than they had to. Even if the object they came to obtain was arguably the most dangerous thing there, nothing made it into the M-Vault if it wasn’t deemed an extreme threat. In fact, M-Vault was only a temporary option until Laurel could arrange for something more permanent in space. And for all that threat, Warrick couldn’t help but think the containment device looked overly mundane; like the milk cans he remembered seeing on a field trip to a In the moment that the yellow gem became active, it helped—at least from Lisa’s mind—to see Warrick forming his tower shield to interpose himself between it and Cyn. Her mission, no matter how much she wanted to focus on protecting her friends, was to protect the world first. If the thing from another world or someone under its sway got out into the larger world, it could be an apocalyptic event like Cyn described nearly happened to Device World. And so, putting her faith in Warrick’s A few moments ago, all he’d felt was pride. After almost two weeks of junior detective work; identifying the two older teens who dealt street chemist drugs a few blocks from his school; tailing them to where they dropped their money and picked up their supply not much farther away behind a restaurant, and from there matching pictures he’d taken of their suppliers to NYC’s public mugshot database; he’d finally gotten video of the dealers picking up a fresh supply and send it off to the NYPD’s The Witch’s Tower had been created from the ‘tower seed’ Morganna had once attempted to plant in the leyline in Fredricksburg, Virginia. Drawing from that deep source of dormant magic, it would have been capable of focusing and manifesting untold power and becoming a fortress of arcane might. No such leyline existed in the remote area of Alaska where Lisa, Laurel, Kay and the small group of neophyte wizards called the Magi Club planted it instead. As such, they had to actively feed magic into Cyn’s declaration was undercut by a laugh from the doorway. They glanced over to find Lisa standing there. Her staff was still held firm in one hand, but her expression had lost some of the intensity from earlier. “A cartoon?” She asked. “What would you call it?” Cyn asked with a shrug. “Our arms and legs are all rubbery-like and we’ve got the semi-solid thing going on I use sometimes. We can do anything old-timey cartoon characters can do.” For emphasis, she started bouncing their body, Shortly, Laurel returned to let the pair know that she had the Kaines and Tink on video chat and would be transferring them over momentarily. Warrick and Cyn waited in agonizing silence for what could have only been a minute or less, but which felt like a week. Back straight, hands clasped behind them, they looked as if they were facing a firing squad. The chat screen appeared, split between the Kaine family including Warrick’s sister, Tammy on the left all sitting on the couch in their living “Ready?” The ‘training room’ Lisa had created in the Tower was a cramped, five by five broom closet colored such a bright, pervasive white that it was impossible to make out the corners. It might as well have been infinite, especially with the sourceless, just-as-white light that filled the space. Warrick and Cyn nodded as one, aware that even though Lisa was elsewhere in the building, the training room allowed her full awareness of what they were doing. After a three day wait for her to bring Gallium’s inattention was brought to a swift end by the boom of a shotgun. A single deer slug sank into the small of her back, it’s momentum making her stumble forward, almost tripping over the sprawled Partlowe. “Oh, you are very much asking for a beat-down,” she muttered, turning to face a man dual-wielding sawed off shotguns. He hadn’t fired again, favoring his shoulder from where his gun’s kickback had likely done some real, lasting damage. Still, he tried leveling the weapon in his good The cool, night air blowing in from Lake Standish caused Cyn’s short, white locks to tickle her forehead and ears as she sat, cross-legged atop the roof of Freeland House. Her eyes were closed and she breathed slowly, listening to the Friday-night parties going on along the lakeshore; a blend of different songs playing; all but the heaviest base making its way across the water. A soft thump added itself to the noise. Completely expected, though she’d expected his arrival to come a bit Kareem looked around the table and—not for the first time that day—wondered how he got there. Earlier that morning, he’d met Lily at the gym in his building. She’d been joining him in his morning exercise routine for the past month or so, offering surprisingly amiable company considering how he remembered her from high school. Today, when they normally would have gone their separate ways, she’d invited him to bunch and he’d accepted. Simple, really, but he still felt distinctly out of place Kareem raised an eyebrow as Warrick fidgeted on the barstool at the kitchen counter of the apartment they shared with JC. Warrick had come a long way with his usual social awkwardness over the years, so it was never a good thing when he started behaving oddly with his friends—and that took zero mind reading. Warrick caught the raised brow and its meaning just as easily and looked away, scratching his head with the hand that wasn’t fiddling with a bottle of soda. He’d been caught out and was Juniper was pretty sure she should have been tired, having awoken at the crack of dawn to fly from Arizona to Virginia, riding up the Freeland House just to immediately board a private shuttle out to Dayspring College’s private airfield just to catch another flight back west to Detroit. Should have been. But the truth was, she was bursting with excitement. Bursting, and bouncing in her seat. “Looking forward to seeing the world, Jun?” Cyn gave her a toothy grin, “Or just Detroit?” “Or maybe “You know,” Facsimile began, alighting on a convertible lying on its side, “I usually mock the bad guys who bring robots or guns to a super-fight in Mayfield… but I guess we’re not in Mayfield, so I’ll let it slip this time.” She smirked, “Oh wait—you just straight up planned to attack the team with a metal-bender in a giant robot. I have zero sympathy for what’s about to happen to you.” Osp lowered Alloy to the pavement just in front of where she was standing. He craned his neck to look the Metal screamed, accompanied by pops like gunshots that resounded through the cockpit of the rapidly disintegrating Junker mecha. The entire structure quaked as the forces of nature and laws of physics once more took hold as the magic retreated from it’s superstructure. The look of smug satisfaction on Bill Trembley’s face dissolved into terror as his brain caught up to the fact that his victory of the super-heroine was predicated on the principle that he would be alongside her as they were The front windows of the Jiffy-mart had been blown out, scattering glass and metal across the parking lot. Two of the cars that had been in the path of whatever had done so had been push back several feet, their front ends crumpled as if they had been in head-on collisions. Between them and the gas pumps, a police car looks as it it had been sideswiped itself, both front and rear passenger doors crushed in so far in that it looked to be nearly bent in half. Its former occupants had pulled back With a muffled beep from its electronic lock, the rooftop access to the fifty-second floor of the Sentinel Insurance building swung open. Anyone standing among the HAVACsystems and solar panels up there would have seen an overweight, red-faced man with cauliflower ear and a Breeze-E Heating and Cooling uniform on stepping through it, but the reality was quite different. Instead, the intruder was a woman, standing around five-foot-nothing wearing a maroon motorcycle helmet and matching long, The moment the Myriads’ stances shifted, Renaissance gestured inside her gauntlets, cycling the grapnel magazines. Her latest design allowed for three different types of ammunition to be stored at once and rotated as needed. The indicator light on the back of the left one went pink, the right green. The first Myriad that reached her was wielding a truncheon. Renaissance sidestepped them and slammed her right shoulder into the hollow of their armpit. Their feet left the ground in the clash and Renaissance tightened her fist. Myriad wasn’t wrong. Without being able to tell which Myriad was the real person, she couldn’t go all out against them. Her goggles were returning heat signatures from each one of them, so that wasn’t any help. Only, she’d never entered a fight as Renaissance with the intention to go all out with her physical strength. “You’re making that same mistake,” she said quietly. One hand dipped into the pocket of her kilt. All of the Myriads hesitated, watching that “Right in there, miss.” the voice of the orderly barely reached the hospital room before a sight to behold burst in. Tink hadn’t bothered transforming out of her Renaissance costume, only pulling back her cowl and goggles. Dried blood caked one legs and both hands where she hadn’t even noticed that the shattered pieces of her gauntlets had punctured her arms. Part of a spiked chain had caught and torn part of her costume from below her shoulder blade to her ribs; material meant to repel higher “So you say your dreams are getting worse? Have they become more frequent?” Dr. Patricia Masters’ office had an open air to it. One entire curved wall was given over to windows overlooking the Potomac River and allowing natural light to flood in, highlighting the hardwood floors and cherry wood furniture from the low bookshelves on the far wall to the old-fashioned roll-top writer’s desk in the corner, to the coffee table in the center of the room. On one side of that was a love seat; cherry Someone had provided yet another ‘formal’ heroic costume for the occasion. This one was a silk dress that fell to her ankles with a generous slit up on thigh. It was a deep crimson that only showed it color as different from black when the light struck it just right and cinched at the waist by a belt made of strings of black beads with a faux ruby buckle in the front. A velvet half-cape with her customary hood draped elegantly over her shoulders. One of her teammates, whose public name was The crowds outside the hotel following the DRW banquet were predictable. There were the fans of the Descendants teams and superheroes in general alongside pro-descendant activists and, of course, the press, all gathered on the sidewalk hoping to catch a glimpse or ask questions.And of course, across the street was the opposition. Signs expressing support for the Braylocke Laws and the Interstate Psionics Bounty Agency, disdain for DRW and the descendant-majority Colombian government, and “So you just bought this thing and had it delivered in like a couple of hours?” Teen Machine looked around appreciatively at the RV’s interior. They had long since exhausted bets and hypotheses about what was going to happen, and his attention had naturally turned to the closest machine; that being the vehicle itself. It wasn’t much to write home about: behind the front cabin where the driver and front passenger sat, there were two diner-style booths on either side of a center aisle equipped The creature of darkness and metal towered over Lisa. In the dappled shadow of the jungle, it raised one arm—the right one, which she now saw was significantly longer than the left. Instead of a hand, it ended in a hollow tube, which it steadied with its left hand. “No tay moo ayvaas pahghana.” A voice boiled out from inside its helmet, thick as tar. It was unmistakably a language, but as if spoken from the bottom of a well. Something about it tickled in the back of Lisa’s brain, searching for The astral body was the impression left by a person on the astral plane, comprised of a combination of core emotions, self image, impressions from others, and in some cases their powers or magic. Kareem had lain eyes on many astral bodies in his life; the deep azure of heroic souls, a manifestation of the legendary cart of Juggernaut, the tortured forms of transfigured monsters—but never something like this. The man sitting calmly on his rocking chair, was, on the astral where the self of self Over the three years the Descendants had protected Mayfield, a hard lesson had been shared among the career criminals and occasional supervillain that tried to operate in Mayfield: metal was a no-go. If your plans involved a gun, knife, automobile, city street with manhole covers or street lamps or even a zipper with metal in its construction, you were taking a supreme risk. If you had implants or a prosthetic, be they a whole robotic arm or just some screws in your knee, most gangs wouldn’t |
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