Vector leapt clear of the wreckage of the giant robot bat at just the right moment, his momentum sending him rolling ten or fifteen feet through some broken glass. He could feel where glass was stuck into his face, his chest, his arms, and his back, and he was dripping blood from multiple places. No time for that now, Daniel thought. It wasn’t the first time he’d been rolled through broken glass, in any case. Having a healing factor helped at times like these, even though it was probably the case that Daniel relied on it too much.

He was up and turning around as soon as he could, ready to confront the next bat…which had been more damaged than he thought when the one he had been attacking crashed into it. Still, no reason to take chances, he figured, and before the thing could get up Vector impaled it once more on the same spike he had grown to bring the other one out of the sky. The robot lurched, breaking the spike off and throwing Daniel into a wall. Damn, Daniel thought, getting up slowly and trying to recover his breath. Too overextended to grow another spike just now…

He could see the hardware store where the other bat had met its end just up ahead – the three robots had been about to meet back up there, just as he expected. He was rather impressed that he’d all but destroyed two on his own – he’d been expecting to need rather more help.

“Hello, in there!” he called out to the as-yet-unseen victor over the other bat. “This last one’s still struggling.” He coughed wetly into his hand and spat some blood on the ground.

Dynamo was still surveying the carnage and wondering whether or not now was an appropriate time to book it. As an unregistered PE, he assumed he was liable for property damage caused by any conflict in which he was a participant, though he supposed that he might catch a break on account of shutting down a rampaging robot that would've caused considerably more damage had it been allowed to go unchecked. And he would walk away from all this with little more than some bruises and still-ringing ears. Not bad, really. It was okay for him to do something vaguely heroic every once in a while.

Someone was yelling outside, though the line between "inside" and "outside" had blurred considerably when the mecha-bat had smashed the storefront and brought down part of the building's roof. Dynamo peered past the dust and wreckage, spying another bat--this one extensively damaged, but still fighting to the best of its abilities--and a blood-spattered man, currently backed up against a concrete wall. Fuck, thought Dynamo, there are more of these things?

Debris littering the remnants of the hardware store was going to slow him down, but the least Dynamo could do was give the guy a hand. The chain was too long to drag in its entirety; he'd have to leave it behind. Hopefully he could get a decent grip on this new adversary long enough to short it out completely. Ignoring the pain in his hip, the musician vaulted over some collapsed shelving and staggered into the street, only a short run's distance away from the bat. It was still thrashing about, despite being impaled, and the last thing Dynamo wanted to do was get his head sliced off by the sharp edge of a struggling bat's bladed wing.

Light reflected off of something on the pavement, drawing his attention momentarily downward. The swirling colors of an oil rainbow, he realized, trail leading straight toward the flailing bat-machine. The spike jutting through its body must've punctured some sort of fuel or lubricant reservoir.

If there's ever any doubt, go with the flashiest option.

Dynamo quickly dropped to the ground, snapped his fingers, and grazed the pooling oil with their tips before quickly rolling away. Flame rushed across the ground toward the mechanical bat as the fuel vapors ignited, creating a sudden line of fire. The musician had covered his face with one arm after performing his human sparkplug act, which unfortunately meant that he missed the respectable pyrotechnics that resulted from the igniting vapor trail meeting a much larger collection of evaporated flammable hydrocarbons within the bat's body. Hopefully that other guy had enough sense to get out of the way in the event that pressure sent bat-shrapnel flying.

His next album, he decided, would have to be titled Sparkplug.

Vector threw himself to the side as the bat went up in flames. He was a man who could appreciate a good explosion, but not when it was right in front of him. Fortunately, he managed to get clear in time, and wound up near Dynamo.

"Good one," he said, getting up. He started to pick glass out of the skin of his right arm, which was slow going because there was so goddamn much of it. When he had a small patch de-glassed, he concentrated for a moment and the skin closed up with a sizzling noise.

"Do you think that's the last of them?"

"Don't see any more around here," replied Dynamo as he got to his feet, noting that he had, as expected, singed his fingertips a bit in the process of igniting the bat's leaking fluids. He contemplated putting them in his mouth for a moment before realizing that sucking on a burned finger was probably the least badass thing he could be doing at this particular time. He turned toward Vector, widening eyes betraying his shock as he realized just how battered the other man appeared, until he realized that this newcomer was pulling glass shards out of his arm with his hands. "Neat trick," he added coolly, trying to sound unimpressed. "Gonna be okay without a trip to the E-room, then?"

Not waiting for an answer, Dynamo put one hand casually on his hip and extended the other to offer a handshake. "I'm Dynamo. You probably haven't heard of me."

"Vector." Daniel pulled a shard of glass out of his right wrist and shook droplets of blood onto the ground. A moment of concentration closed the wound with a sizzle and he shook Dynamo's hand. "No one's heard of me, either. And no, I'll be fine without hospitals." He extracted a shard from his shoulder and closed that wound, as well, tossing the bloody piece of glass aside to go "plink" against a wall. "Although I'll be pulling glass out of my skin all night, I think. Not the first time, won't be the last."

Well. This guy had certainly gotten good luck in the PE lottery. Being able to regenerate such nasty wounds at obviously visible speed beat a lot of other options if your goal in life was to go out and be a big damn hero, busting up giant metal robot animals or whatever else might threaten Metro City. "You come out here on purpose to fight these crazy things? Or is this a 'right place, right time' kind of thing?"

"Right place, right time," Vector informed him. "I was up on a roof and I heard them coming. You're in the same boat, I guess?" He sized Dynamo up. He doesn't look like much of a fighter. Could probably break his spine before he knew I was behind him. Still, he's got a power.

"Let's talk while we walk, I want to make sure this area's clear."

"Fight more of these things?" He was fortunate to have managed as well as he did against two...well, more like one-and-a-half of them. Then again, he had to admit that there was a certain sport to it. Besides, he had a reputation to keep up, whether Vector realized it or not. Being able to walk the walk every once in a while was at least as important as being able to rock the talk.

"Yeah, sure, I'm down for an encore." Dynamo swept his fingers up and back through his hair, re-setting it with a touch of static. Much better. Wait. There was something weird about this whole thing.

Dynamo cocked his head to one side, giving Vector a quizzical look. "The hell were you doing on a roof?"

Vector gave a one-armed shrug. "Monitoring the situation below," he said, casually. "Knew there was trouble here in the city, figured I'd be better off with a bird's-eye view of it. Turns out I was right."

Electric powers? he thought. That would be useful where I'm from.

Who does this guy think he is, Bruce Wayne?

"Right, rooftops, bird's-eye view of trouble, yeah, all that shit. You a card-carrying member, or are you part of the indie scene? Y'know, don't answer that if you don't want to talk about it, I can handle it if people want to keep a few secrets to preserve the mystique."

Without waiting for a response, Dynamo flashed a showman's grin at Vector. "I do a music thing, if you're into that. Got some sampler discs in the saddlebags of my bike, which is parked up the street in an underground garage, so hopefully it's scratch-free." The musician frowned harshly, making a cutting motion across his throat with one finger. "Because if there's so much as a chip in the paint on account of these fucking animals I am going to find the man, woman, or hyper-intelligent child responsible and slap them to death with my electrified dick."

"I'm free-range right now," Vector said. "But I expect I'm going to have a need for CAPE's resources somewhere down the line. But that's going to have to wait after I pull together some basic amenities...I can't put 'some roof somewhere' as my address and 'walk around the city shouting my name' as my telephone. I'd love to hear your music, but I don't have anything to play it on. The only possessions I have in this t-- in this city are the clothes on my back and about two hundred and twenty dollars. And you'll excuse me if that continues to go towards food rather than a fucking iPod.

"If we catch them, I'll let you slap them to death with whatever part of your body you want. I won't judge."

Their path over the next several minutes took them towards the outskirts of the slums, more towards the invisible line that demarcated "downtown Metro City" from the parts that had less of a view of the water. A path, incidentally, past one of the few places to get dinner that was still open for business in the late afternoon on the day people were already (unbeknownst to Dynamo and Vector) calling Black Thursday.

"You want to get a burrito?" Vector asked, indicating the lone burrito stand in operation on the street.

Well. Burrito. That was a pretty solid idea, all said. And, shit, some hardass street vendor was still out here, or had come right back out here, to peddle his delicious and authentic Tex-Mex fare to whoever the hell had the tenacity to have stuck it out during the catastrofuck with the robotic animals. "Hell yes, I want a burrito, generating a hundred thousand volts with my body burns a lot of calories."

Dynamo headed briskly toward the vendor's stand, raising a finger. "Yo, burrito man! Hit me up with one with extra guacamole."

Vector got two burritos for himself - shredded pork, rice, extra pico de gallo, lettuce - and sat down on the curb next to Dynamo to eat them. Because Vector knew that sometimes when the world has gone to hell, your best friend is a full stomach...and when you'd just prevented the world from going to hell, that could be just as true.

Besides, he'd left some ungodly number of calories impaled in those robots, and however healed his skin was, beneath it there was plenty that needed fixing.

They were damn good burritos, too. Daniel could see why the guy selling them expected he would be able to sell them even despite what was going on around him.

Not too far away, the boards on the entrance of an abandoned subway station exploded away from their moorings and clattered in the street. From it emerged the Crimson Defender, coughing, spitting, and waving away dust and cobwebs. "Spiders. Too many spiders. I do not like the spiders. Or their webs."

He called down the stairs to his compatriate, the swordfighter Flashpoint. "Hey! You okay back there?"

Flashpoint, on the other hand, came walking out very calmly and not covered in spiderwebs. "Yeah, I think I'm good. Thanks for blasting away and then also running into every cobweb on the way up. Made my trip much more pleasant." Flashpoint took a few moments to look around and get his bearings. "Well, the entire city isn't on fire. That's a good thing."

Vector leapt to his feet at the sound of the blast, his second burrito in one hand and a chitinous spike quickly emerging from his opposite wrist.

"Ah," he said, when he saw who was emerging from underground. "I think that's the Crimson Defender." He let the spike be reabsorbed into his skin, looking a little embarrassed.

Not only were portions of the city relatively intact, but not too far away from the subway exit, two other veterans of Black Thursday were hanging out near the only open eatery for a decent radius. Dynamo, practically inhaling his street burrito, glanced up at the sound of other human voices.

Oh, what. Red and yellow spandex. Toned and fit. It just had to be. It was the golden boy, the motherfucking paladin of Metro City. The Crimson Defender.

Dynamo had never actually met the guy before, but just being around him would definitely be bad for his image. No one would ever take him seriously as a master super-villain if he was seen in public hanging around with Crimson Dee. Then again, maybe this would just add to his legend--really good super-villains never actually got caught doing anything wrong, or at the very least had plausible deniability. He figured it was a lot like the gangster rap aesthetic. You wanted to sound like a total hardass in verse, bragging about all the motherfuckers you'd capped for getting in your way, but you never wanted there to be any concrete evidence that you were a murderer or a drug dealer or a pimp on account of the fact that going to jail was a quick shortcut to the end of your musical career.

He wondered briefly if Crim was into rock-and-roll.

"Yeah, I think that's him. Looks like we're not the only ones who've seen battle today. Think he'll know any more about how all this shit went down?"

"He'd know," Vector answered. "I'm certain. Come on, let's go talk to him. Unless he's...not indie enough for you?" He smirked and raised an eyebrow.

Dynamo responded to Vector with only a flippant, dismissive wave of his hand.

Rising from the curb, the rock star strode toward Crimson Dee and his companion, stuffing the remainder of the burrito into his mouth and waving at the two. Some approximation of "yo!" escaped his mouth around the mess of shredded beef and lettuce.

Once the Defender cleared the webs from his face, he saw a pair of men approaching them, both of them probably PEs, going off appearance alone. He waved back, saying "yo" in kind.

"What's going on?" he asked. "We've been stuck in the sewers a while... any new developments?"

Swallowing theatrically, Dynamo assumed a casual posture, hand on one hip. "We wasted some big mecha-bats. Things have pretty much died down out here. As you can see, Metro City's hardiest civilians are already out on the street again, peddling burritos. A testament to the human spirit. Here we are, in the center of chaos, city crumbling on account of some twisted motherfucker of an engineer, and already I can stuff my face with barbacoa. Metro City is a sleeping phoenix, ready to rise from its own ashes at a moment's notice."

There. That was suitably poetic shit to say in the aftermath of a disaster.

"The fuck were you doing in the sewer?"

The Defender tried to suppress a confused expression. Why is he talking like that? It's a street in the slums, not Winterfell. But, be nice, Jackson... maybe he's got a brain thing going on.

Answering his question, he responded, "Oh. Looking for the makers of a robot gorilla. I'd say I know that sounds weird, but, mechabats. Gotta assume they're from the same source. Any of the bad guys get captured yet?"

Dynamo shrugged, digging around in his jacket pocket for his Zippo and cigs. "I haven't captured anyone today. What about you, Vec?" he added, glancing back over his shoulder as he punctuated his sentence with the ka-clink of the lighter.

"No one captured. I've only got a kill and a half today, and both ran on batteries. Have you fought anyone who isn't a robot today?"

He took a bite of his second burrito and chewed while he waited for an answer.

"Actually, yeah," Flashpoint said, "There was some guy that had a arm cannon thing, but as soon as I showed up he inexplicably disappeared. And we haven't seen hide nor hair of him since." He walked up to the PEs, extending a hand to shake each of theirs. "Hi, I'm Flashpoint. I don't think we've ever met." He then saw the food in their hands, then saw the burrito vendor, then realized he was actually extremely hungry. "Actually, hold that thought. I'll be right back." Flashpoint walked over to the burrito vendor, ordering a burrito with chicken, guacamole, rice, lettuce and tomatoes. He then set about inhaling it.

Boreas (555-423-8808) to Red: Red, we found her. Photoya and the Crusader are accounted for, too.

The Defender's belt started buzzing, and he checked it to find his phone had a new message. "Oh... hang on a second, guys..." he said as he responded.

CD to Boreas: Thank god. What happened? We couldn't find them anywhere.

Vector wiped his pico-de-gallo-scented hand on his pants in preparation for Flashpoint's handshake and then blinked as it was abruptly aborted in favor of dinner. That hand went back in the pocket of his sweatpants.

"You're getting a message?" he asked the Defender, examining the hero's phone from a respectable distance, certainly at the wrong angle to read the screen.

"Yeah," he said, a bit absentmindedly. "A couple other heroes went missing when we were down there... Boreas says he found them... and Seraph too, thank god... looks like we might all be done here..."

Flashpoint walked back to the group, burrito in hand and mouth, with his mask peeled up enough for his mouth to show so that he could eat.

"Oh god, they found them?" Flashpoint said around a mouthful of food. He hadn't realized just how ravenous he was until he'd taken that first bite, and damn those burritos were good. "Is everyone alright?"

The Defender could only look on in hunger. Note to self: he thought to himself. Stop patrolling without money.

"Yeah!" he exclaimed to the feasting fencer. "Seraph, Photoia AND the Crusader, so unless there are some robot pigeons floating around...

"Mark one in the win column."

"Danger's over? Horrible robot assault on Metro City has ended? Whoever's responsible for this bullshit has been found and brought to whatever passes for justice? Fan-fucking-tastic," quipped Dynamo, cigarette dangling idly at his side. "Guess that means I can head to my gig this evening without concern that a killer mechanical emu or whatever is going to take out the club with a hail of steel feathers. 'We' win. Good to know."

The musician threw up his free hand in a lazy salute directed toward Crimson Defender and Flashpoint. "If that's all, I'm gonna gitfo. Come to one of my shows sometime if you want to take me up on that demo CD, Vec."

"Wait," Flashpoint said, idly saluting back, "So whodunnit? Was it Meltron?"

"I'll keep an eye out for one," Vector promised. "Thanks for your help with that last bat, Dynamo."

He turned to Flashpoint. "I wouldn't know. All I know is that I did my part."

Boreas (555-423-8808) to Red: The old "stable two-way portal to Canada" trick. Um, and when I said the Crusader is accounted for, I mean he's on the other end of a different portal that kinda...closed. So, accounted for but...not...technically...nearby. Might take some doing to get him back, we should get Rom on the task.

CD to Boreas: Good to know. I'll text him next if you haven't. Is everyone okay? I know the Canadians can be a bit crusty...

"I don't know who did it," replied the Defender, "but apparently they were Canadian. That's just... weird. I didn't think supervillains were much of a big deal in Canada, let alone to the point where they'd need to export evil..."

"Canadian?" asked Flashpoint, "What the hell do the Canadians have against Seraph? Is she Canadian?"

"I don't think so," Vector said, taking a last bite of burrito. "But I wouldn't know." Because, of course, Vector didn't know her secret identity. She could have been anything, as far as he was concerned.

Boreas (555-423-8808) to Red: They're crusting all over us. Sable took a bullet in the leg that needs to be operated on, Photoya got badly burned. Everyone's alive, though.

Just then! Flashpoint and the Crimson Defender receive:

"CAPE Alert: All automated forces, gateways, field pylons and associated assets belonging to the supervillain currently codenamed 'That Stupid Rat Bastard What Kidnapped Seraph' are believed to have been shut down. Units which remain powered despite their source having been cut off should be brought to CAPE for study after having been subdued.

Related: dimensional breach powering these assets has also been shut down; holdouts are unlikely but possible. Be aware that should alternate universe counterparts have successfully crossed over, they are easily identifiable by their large, crab-like claws and chitinous shell, 'except for Crab Man's counterpart who probably looks completely normal.' Should crab people from an alternate dimension be identified as being up to no good, personnel are advised to engage only with assistance and should be aware that 'a knife is useless against those massive claws. They could cut through a tank!'

In unrelated news, superheroes with reconstruction-related abilities are requested for assistance in a small matter at O'Houlihan's. In the words of those close to the source, 'this has nothing to do with anything. Honest!'"

Vector and Dynamo don't, though, 'cause they're badass loners who don't need The Man's say-so to go heroing.