Man, this update was tougher to write that I figured. What started as a "oh that's a simple problem" turned into a bigger problem, and a bigger problem... in the end it got pretty ridiculous, as I think you will find!
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Get Your Punch-ON
Asherlee's oversized fist sank into the face of the unfortunate New*** who happened to be standing right where she landed. Limbs flailing, he flew back, smashing a path through the swarm. Before they could surge back, Zophia lashed out with her brush, sending forth a wave of paint, and Dank drove into the gap, battering random raiders with his giant hammer.
"I thought they'd see us coming!" Strop, still airborne, shouted. A thousand snarling faces rose to greet him, so he met them with the head of Thor. It crackled and snapped menacingly as it arced through the air and slammed into the ground, sending out a shockwave that buckled the ground and picked the rioters up and flung them away. "Wait up, I have to sever the rope, cover me!"
Already some of the rioters had spotted the rope attached to the giant arrow lodged firmly in the ground, and were attempting to form a human wall around it while some brave (or stupid) rioters had already started climbing the rope.
"Oi!" Strop called, "Get down from there, it's... it's dangerous!" But above the mighty cacophany of the wrath of thousands, he might as well not have spoken. He tried to break through the wall, but it was a surprisingly cohesive wall, and he merely bounced off. Without hesitation, he brought Thor to bear. "You all face banning!" he yelled, only to be met with defiance and disregard.
"I thought as much," he said to himself, and started indiscriminately slamming rioters with his banhammer. The head drove into a rioter's head on the left, he sank like a deflated blow-up doll. Pivoting on his hooves, Strop turned his shoulders sharply, the oversized tonfa curving in a broad circle ending in another rioter's face, sending him flying like a rag doll. Switching directions, Strop hammered furiously at the wall in front of him, but he had already been singled out and the wall closed around him, people beating at him on all sides. As puny and ineffective as their strikes were in such close quarters, Strop found himself completely unable to move. "And to think I'd have to use dirty boxing," he thought to himself, dispelling the hammer in a puff of black smoke before driving his elbows into the rioters holding him from either side, before landing some heavy liver blows to the rioter in front, then whipping his head back and clocking the rioter behind. Even as he fought, he could see the rioters climbing the rope inching higher and higher...
"STROP, JUMP!" came the call, far too loud to be from anything but the Soopahdoopahawesometasticmegamegafone. Batting away the arms pawing at him and using the bodies pressing against him as footholds, he scrambled up just in time to see Zophia, being defended by Dank, pitch the 'fone into the air. From the middle of the seething crowd, there was a muffled grunt and a burly pair of arms flung something black into the air, which uncurled into the latex-clad Dragonmistress, carrying a large... something. Twisting in midair, she unfurled her whip, and the something spun its way in Strop's direction before catching the 'fone. Strop stamped at the hands grabbing his legs before bounding atop some heads, kicking some poor sod right in the face and angling sharply upwards to catch the... object. Still sailing through the air, he glanced at it, and felt his blood run cold.
"FIRE IN THE HOLE!" Dragonmistress called before she was grabbed by the burly arms and swallowed back into the crowd. Thoughts scrambling, Strop wondered what the rest of the team intended for him, before he ran his fingers over the strangely bulky cylinder and a suspicion tugged at his gut.
Without a second thought he turned over and pitched the bomb at the rioters surrounding the rope.
In slow motion, a hundred eyes went wide, and a mass cry of "BOMB!" went up, rippling through the crowd until there was nothing but a mass of screaming and people falling over each other trying to get away from the falling bomb. The human wall buckled and scattered. Even the climbing rioters dropped from the rope and scrambled away, leaving some clear space behind the stampede. Space where the bomb would fall and blow Strop to smithereens when it landed. "It did seem like a good idea at the time," Strop was vaguely aware of thinking, then being aware that he had now entered that out-of-body experience which signalled his imminent death.
The bomb hit the cobblestone with a glassy "ka-tunk", rolled to one side, and lay still.
Strop landed on the road, dashed to the rope, summoning his banhammer and smashing the cobble stone, exposing the giant arrow lodged in the ground. Then he whipped an incendiary arrow out of his quiver and struck it against the ground, and was rewarded with a flash of fire, which he touched to the frayed end of the rope. Immediately, fire streaked up the length of the rope, a blazing dot advancing into the distance until all he held in his hands was a blackened husk of what was once a strong cable. Taking the briefest of moments to watch the irrational stampede try to distance itself from him, without much success. Then he bent over, and picked up the bomb.
"Can you see through all that paint, Moe?" Strop asked, vaguely recalling the time he dressed a certain somebody from head to toe in plaster so that he might pose a similar question.
"I WILL TOLERATE THIS HUMILIATION FOR THE SAKE OF PRESERVING THIS CITY," came Moe's testy reply.
Silently, Strop thanked Zophia's creativity, but was interrupted by her call over the 'fone. "A LITTLE HELP, STROPPYKINS?"
"I should return the favour!" Strop said to nobody in particular, slinging Moe over his back and sprinting for the nearest apartment block. He hit it at a gallop and scrambled up it as far as he could go, all four limbs madly clawing at the pitted walls and shattered windows until he could see what was going on.
The stampede had converged upon the rest of the moderator team, and for all the power of Dank's hammer, Asherlee's dual broadswords, DM's whip and Zophia's brush, they were making no headway for there was nowhere to go.
In the thick of it, the quartet were facing the crowd on all sides, pressing in on them so hard their backs were in turn pressed to each other. Asherlee's swords were locked together, held firmly by a dozen hands heedless of their sharpness or the fury of the woman who wielded them. Dragonmistress herself had no room to swing a cat, let alone space to wind up her whip. Dank couldn't swing his hammer without hitting Zophia, and Zophia couldn't move because she was engaged in a tug of war with her precious brush in the middle.
"Isn't that Strop up there?" Dragonmistress noted.
"Wherever he is," Dank growled, too short to see anything, "He better think up something smart soon."
Indeed, Strop was hanging on the windowsill, trying to think of a smart idea.
He couldn't think of any.
"Oh well, I guess things can only get better from here!" he said to himself, before pitching himself off the sixth storey and towards the crowd.
Dense as the crowd was, nobody was quite stupid enough to support the endeavour of crowd surfing from twenty meters above. A black mass hurtled into the ground with a thud audible even over the roar of a thousand voices calling for blood. A startled gasp went up, and the crowd swelled back from the likely-corpse.
Strop rose to his hooves, rubbing his nose. "That's the last time I take the fall with a giant jar on my back," he muttered, before settling into a stance. Rioters surrounded him, warily, keeping at least an arm's length from him, not sure what to make of his apparent lack of dying. Guessing where the others were, he advanced aggressively, pulling people away and tossing them behind him, until Asherlee's towering figure became visible.
"STROP!" she bellowed. "WE THOUGHT YOU OFFED YOURSELF."
"I'm not that stu-," Strop started to retort, before remembering that landing on one's face from such a height would indeed be considered monumentally stupid. "I'm here now!" was all he said. Fortituously, his spectacular re-entry had distracted the crowd from the moderators enough that they were all looking at him and his 'bomb', not sure what to make of the suicidal horse-thing. Strop made a couple of sudden moves at the nearest rioters and they shrank back. Zophia was able to yank her brush away, and she promptly painted a wall around the little space they had. Immediately, a papery banging noise bombarded them from all sides.
"Well, for all these shenanigans, at least we're alive." Dank grunted. "What now?"
"We need a quick trick that we can cast in these, uh, cosy quarters," Strop explained, trying to push the paper back out where it was starting to cave in.
"Count me out of that," Asherlee said, flexing her biceps. "I don't have any powers apart from these guns."
Strop chewed his lower lip, trying to ignore the ferrous taste from what was no doubt his bloody nose. "Dragonmistress, now might be a good time to call Devoidless."
"Yeah probably." DM reached into her belt, and drew out a thin tube. She raised the tube to her lips and blew.
Devoidless was nowhere to be seen.
"I don't think he's coming back anytime soon," she remarked. "I can't even feel his presence."
Strop turned to Zophia. "Draw a bird and hoist us out of here?"
Zophia whipped up another coat of paint on the cracking wall. "I can't do that and reinforce this wall at the same time. And I can't reinforce this wall much longer either, the brush is drying up," she added.
Dank smacked his hammer against the floor. "Fine. I'll have to do it," he said, clearly looking unhappy.
"Do what?" the others asked in unison.
"Magic."
"Which magic?"
"The one type I can do in this space: a windspout."
With that he twirled the head of his hammer at the top of the circular wall, muttering under his breath. Glowing figures appeared and swirled around and around, gaining more letters and semicolons and line-breaks, until it became a veritable storm of characters.
"</mx:Application>" he declared, before stamping the handle of his hammer on the ground. "EXECUTE!"
Immediately, a horrible shrieking arose, and a current picked the lot of them up and spat them out of the crumbling wall.
As they flew up, turning over and over, Strop shouted, "Great, Dank, what next?"
"I dunno!" Dank shouted back, "You guys improvised so well earlier, I figured you'd know what to do now."
Still flying upwards, the rioters below but a mass of dots, everybody turned the best they could to look at each other, slight confusion and horror writ on their faces. "This script expires soon, by the way."
Dragonmistress flicked out her whip, curling the end around the lot of them and grabbing it, drawing them closer together.
"I don't suppose you can draw that bird now, could you?" Strop asked Zophia as they reached the apex of their upward rush.
"There's nothing to paint on," Zophia pointed out, as they started to fall again.
"Now would be a great time to rediscover your telekinesis," Strop begged Moe.
"BELIEVE ME, I'M TRYING," Moe retorted. "IT'S NOT EASY WHEN ONE IS OUT OF THEIR MIND."
"It's on me, then," Strop concluded, obviously, pulling out the biggest exploding net arrow he could find, praying it was large enough. Mustering all his strength, he nocked the arrow (which more closely resembled a ballista crossbolt), and drew it back as far as he could, before shooting it towards the ground.
"I don't suppose you have a 'arachute arrow' handy?" Dank shot as they plummeted back to ground.
"Shut up," Strop grunted, nocking four bolts at once and firing them after the net, praying that they would fly true. Dragonmistress tightened her grip on the whip's rope, and as they picked up speed, they all started screaming.
"If this doesn't work, I just wanted to say it was a pleasure working with you guys!" Asherlee bellowed, barely audible over the howling wind and the screams. Even at that speed, it was clear that the rioters had all turned their eyes to the spectacle, and were trying to shuffle away from the modly projectile's projected point of impact. Masses of colour became discernible figures, became wide open gaping horrified looks, and the ground came rushing up to smash them all.
A great force grabbed them, slowing their advance before stopping it altogether, just inches from the cobblestone. They collectively groaned involuntarily as their organs were squeezed to breaking point by the gargantuan deceleration, causing their eyes to bulge out. Then the pressure eased, as the net, permanently stretched, tried to regain its original shape but ended up sagging, leaving them suspended high above the ground.
There was a moment of stunned silence, then the crowd roared back to life with a universal cry of "GET THEM!", and they started swarming into the apartment blocks.
"Nice save," Dank admitted, gasping for air.
"Thanks. That bought us about two minutes!" Strop similarly panted.
"Then let's get outta here, what say we split?" DM and Asherlee finally managed between the two of them.
Strop helped the others off the sagging net, onto the nearest rooftop, noting as he passed the extent to which the supporting bolts had bent. "Good idea guys. Let's meet at the Armusement Park," he said, before setting off.
"Where are you going, Strop, the Armusement Park is thataway," Zophia pointed in precisely the opposite direction to the one Strop was facing.
"...I have some business to do. I'll see you there," was all he said, before bounding off the rooftop.
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Tomorrow I'll come back and authorise some postings. Then TO THE ARMUSEMENT PARK!!!
