Xaviers!

It's like somebody sucked out all the empty space from the world. Individual areas with people in them remaining as islands that rush in towards each other until they're all that remains. Most of the mall, the magic shop, parts of the beach, the entire ocean, roads and diners and shops, all the empty areas disappear. Suddenly all the groups can see each other. A spot of sand with Thresher fighting Bear, Haley and Bruce, at a bit of a distance Nika is standing in front of Katarina, suddenly finding herself face to face with a horde of zombies. On the other side of the shambling corpses are Vivienne, Gemma, Sean, Chase and the little Goblin. Next to them a section of collapsed mall sits on top of a giant car-robot as Basil, Colette, Chisaki and Diego pick themselves out of the rubble. To their side, and bordering the beach as well to complete the circle, are Will, Sam, Tereza and Isolde in the remains of a street.

In the middle, floating above it all is Conduit, streams of hard-light matter still flowing into the glimmering shell around her, replenished and exceeding what she'd gathered initially as most of the simulation has been drawn into her.

"I'm sorry, Conduit. I didn't know how you felt. In fact, I think you need a hug."

"Gemma! Viv! Get as close to Conduit as you can! Physical contact if possible!"

Katarina continued hiding behind Nika.

"<Nika, you have to do something now! There's nowhere left to hide!"> she shouted, in Symkarian.

Nika, to her credit, does jump into action. She'd prioritized keeping Katarina safe over helping the others, but now the two were kind of becoming the same. The metal rods she's carrying that had previously been the legs of barstools snap forward and start impaling zombies off tot he side as she throws a kick at the closest one.

Gemma answers the Morrigan's call almost immediately, trying to find a way to launch herself at Conduit either around or through any zombies that get in her way.

"Shari! Can you turn into something that flies and is big enough to carry Gemma and Viv?"

The Goblin turns her head towards Sam, confused. She points a finger at herself with a questioning expression.

"What the bloody hell is going on," Sean said more than a little confused after the brief elation of the dragon falling. He continued tryingto keep the zombies at bay as best he could with some rather flashy evocation magic.

Shari's lack of understanding ends up bit of a moot point though, as Conduit let's out a concussive blast that knocks everybody, including the remaining zombies and Thresher, prone.

"Maybe." she snarls. "I haven't made myself clear about who's in charge here."

Will landed, face-first, on the ground.

He then shifted upside-down, head splitting apart into feet and feet merging into head, as he regained his feet once more.

"You're going to have to do that about a zillion more times," he said, through gritted teeth, slowly marching forward.

Bruce groaned as he rose. Poor Tosh was going to be covered in band-aids and all the bruise colors tomorrow.

"Did somebody say charge?" he asked with a grin, luminous membranes glowing as he charged up and began a bull-rush.

Sean slowly pushed himself up off the ground not having much in the way of super human endurance to shield him from the effects of the concussive blast and resulting face planting.

"And now there's a sassy super powered child with a god complex," Sean grunted as gathered energy to himself. Doing so had the wonderful side effect of deadening the pain for now. Later would be a different story, but maybe they'd be dead later.

Chase gracefully wobbled to his feet and fired a bola arrow at Conduit. He neglected to consider that his weaponry was probably simulated.

"Convey our apologies to the school." She said as she stood up, her appearance changing now that her mind was her own again. She quickly advanced on Conduit with Gemma.

"Yes you, Shari! You don't have to be a goblin! You can be anything you please!"

"We can get you back to your girlfriend if you can fly Viv and Gemma over to the floating shiny crazy lady!"

"I really don't." she glares and a spike of ice shoots out from under Will's feet, right through him, freezing him in place in more ways than one. Then she makes a sweeping motion as if to backhand him from a distance, the resulting arc taking on physical shape as it strikes the frozen Will and shattering him. The arc of concussive force carries on and strikes Bruce across the face, setting off a burst of electricity that zaps everyone around him. Chase's arrow seems to simply get sucked into Conduit's shell without much fanfare while the arc continues on, sweeping through a cluster of zombies until it hits Gemma. It dissipates in a mass of glitchy distortions that knocks the elf out cold. Vivienne is the one who manages to get close and strike at Conduit, the sword ripping through some of the protective shell. Not enough. Not even close. Conduit backhands her and sends her sprawling.

But something is wrong. The gash that Vivienne's sword cut across Conduit's armor is still there and it chipped a fragment of it out. The dense fragment flickers and turns into a translucent Natalie, floating next to Conduit.

"You being in charge sucks. My turn."

Before Conduit can respond the shimmering gash in Conduit's armor flares and another one appears, the edges buzzing with faint glitches. Another two, copied, the properties of it's glitchiness carrying over as the programming-trap Natalie buried a while ago finally triggers. An exponential, recursive loop that latched on to the damage done by Caledfwlch and replicates it over and over as more and more slices are torn out of Conduit's armor.

"No! Noooo! What are you... That's not how this was supposed to go!" Conduit screeches as the gashes start appearing elsewhere. In the ground, across walls. And where they tear into the simulation there's glimpses of a lawn, school buildings, trees. Campus grounds.

When the last bit of Conduit's shell is sliced away she drops to the ground, what little remains of the simulation around them flickering, twitching. "No-oh-oh..." Conduit cries as she grasps at the air, bits and pieces of hardlight appearing, flickering and whisking out before she can pull them into anything coherent.

"That looks promising," Sean says before cutting his own hand and flicking blood in the air towards Conduit. The blood spray elongates and reshapes itself into crimson crystalline spears that arc towards the floating seemingly open super villain.

A lumbering shape, bits and pieces of his cybernetic enhancements smoking throws itself forward, the spears hitting his shoulder and abdomen, the third glancing off of a metallic reinforcement. Crashing to the ground Thresher props himself up with his uninjured arm and bares his teeth at Sean. It's really more of a token gesture at this point, but he's not going to let Conduit get impaled as long as he can still move.

Tereza drags herself to her feet, wrapping herself in ice as she walks towards Thresher and Conduit. "Night night," she growls, trying to slam an ice-wrapped fist down onto Thresher's head.

Colette wasn't so much knocked prone as she was... like someone had thrown a bucket of water at a wall. It took her a little bit to pull herself together, the girl not as good at reforming as Will was, so by the time she was back on her feet she was able to see the simulation falling apart and the campus reappearing.

"What... just happened?"

A short distance away from the circle of the group, Wanda is curled into the fetal position and shivering, possibly with the cold or maybe something else.

"Gemma stay close to the small one." Vivienne said as she stood and moved quickly to Wanda.

Isolde doesn't even bother to shift back as she wrenches her injured chest into something serviceable and dashes for Wanda.

Wanda's eyes are shut tight and she's figuratively green, looking ill.

Basil had no idea what was going on anymore in the confusion and the chaos, though it seemed the others were in the immediate danger now instead of his group and they were making quick work of that.

He hadn't been thinking, and if it wasn't for the whole world collapsing in on itself at just the right moment, the wire he had decided to stupidly set a trap with would have severed his head clean off his shoulders as the robot pulled it with his own weight. The thought of it was distracting him from the fact his hands were bleeding, but in the sheer anarchy that played out between zombies and a giant shark that looked vaguely familiar to him, no one would notice disembodied, superficial wounds.

Wanda seemed to have been found, so he looked about to make sure no one else was going unnoticed or unaccounted for.

Shari is wandering around a bit aimlessly and confused, still not giving up her little goblin shape as she moves away from the main group. The Raven-Lady had said something about a girlfriend and that had sounded... right?

"Still hits like a bloody lorry," she groans, getting up.

Then she sees the pile of Stanton.

"Will! Crap! Crap, crap crap!"

She looks around for Tereza, then upon spotting her, she turns bright crimson.

"I ah... need you," she says, turning away awkwardly. "To help me with Will."

Chase's cool vigilante outfit bled pixels and faded away, leaving the boy in black slacks and a plain gray tee.

"Can anyone tell me what the heck is going on? Who's the crazy kid and why were she and her ridiculous cyborg trying to kill us?"

Tereza turns and looks at what Sam is talking about. "Sure," she says, reaching out with her power and pulling the icy Will-bits back together, her power helping them flow back together into a single piece.

A single piece, yes. Maybe even something resembling humanoid form, yes. But Tereza's power was over ice, not clay, and so there was relatively little care as to which part of Will was stuck where, precisely. Add in the random green and brown clumps of dirt and grass mixed in, and, well, Tereza probably had a grade-A-worthy project for her impressionist sculpture class.


Will tottered for a second on the balls of what we're going to call his feet for lack of a better word, before falling to the ground with a hard *thud*, morphing and twisting his way through various combinations of limbs, most (but not all) human (or, at least, biological), as he pulled himself together, spitting out clumps of dirt and fertilizer as he coughed his way back to life.

"Are you alright Diego Senpai?" Chisaki asked of Diego once they were free of the debris, addressing him as she normally would.

"Yeah..." Diego said with a sigh, idly fiddling with the UFO shirt he hadn't ever actually changed out of. "Back to just being a terrestrial weirdo. You?"

Will Stanton wrote:Will tottered for a second on the balls of what we're going to call his feet for lack of a better word, before falling to the ground with a hard *thud*, morphing and twisting his way through various combinations of limbs, most (but not all) human (or, at least, biological), as he pulled himself together, spitting out clumps of dirt and fertilizer as he coughed his way back to life.

"Hmm, probably should have been more careful about that," Tereza says, watching Will pull himself back together. "Sorry about that."

"Yes, I am fine."

Oddly, Chisaki looked like... not Chisaki. Not the Chisaki Diego was used to, but the Chisaki he had seen in the machine. Which begged the question of what she was up to when she looked this... normal.

Chisaki wasn't overly concerned with Colette since she literally just watched her room mate get completely smashed and walk it off.

But then something occured to her and she burst into a panic.

"Where is Benson-Senpai?!" She cried out, frantically looking about for him.

"Stay back," Isolde says to Viv, reaching out to try to pick Wanda up.

Vivienne holds her hand over the ground, willing a softball size globe of water in to her palm. “See if you can get her to drink this.”

Chisaki's outburst made Colette think about it as well. In part she was used to not seeing Basil, given his abilities, but the realization that he could be severely injured brought her back into the present. After all he'd run off to enact some kind of plan, she'd been too focused on the Robosaurus wannabe and lost track of him.

"Baseel? Baseel?!"

Tereza Rozanov wrote:"Hmm, probably should have been more careful about that," Tereza says, watching Will pull himself back together. "Sorry about that."

Will looked like he was going to answer, and then scrunched up his face, coughing and hacking once again until a disturbingly large earthworm popped out of his nose.

"Don't...don't mention it. Not bad for a first attempt."