The white flash that filled his eyes whenever undergoing transport disappeared and the Agency Zero agent quickly took in the scene. As he did, he wondered just why the hell couldn’t people of the modern world learn to accept the supernatural and such things. The call the national guard had gotten said this place was being assaulted a ‘a errr-uh, something’ which wasn’t a very good assessment of the situation. Judging by the cage made of magical energy, they were obviously dealing with mages of some type. “Soon as the spell dissipates, run interference. I‘ll deal with the mages.”
Beside M, Debra materialized and did the same thing, at least a far as assessing the situation. However, thanks to her deeper level of perception, her assessment of the situation was a bit different. “Mages? Sir th-”
M barely heard Debra start to tell him something before he activated his power and stepped outside of time. For some reason he still was unable to figure out, despite the number of times he’s done this, everything turned black and white like one of those old movies. It wasn’t that light particles stopped being reflected or anything, he could still see after all.
Still, he couldn’t stop now. Time freezes only ‘lasted’ a couple seconds, and falling back into the normal timeframe was always a bitch. He needed to get things done before they started taking their toll on his body.
M sprinted over to the two apparently frozen people. He really wished he knew a bit more about magic. He only had time to take down one of them. Finally, he just went by the way they were dressed and targeted the male. Dark Emperor of the Apocalypse types like to have eye candy, not be it.
Ranma latterly had no idea what hit him right after two newcomers just appeared out of nowhere. One moment he was staring at two people in business suits, and the next he was laying on the ground with his face half buried in rock.
For her part, Sue jumped back as her husband was knocked to the ground. She felt irrational rage boiling up with damage done to her man, but mystical energies that were keeping the holding cage there kept her from flying off the handle and attacking. Caught between helping Ranma and following the plan, she found herself bogged down with indecision until it was too late.
“Now release the hostages or-OFF!”
Debra blinked as a concussion sphere slammed into M. Judging by the direction it had come from… she ran forward and looked up, and spotted another woman in skimpy clothing with an aura similar to her own. Another one? What the hell were three dragons doing attacking a federal prison?
The woman reached up to activate her comm watch and told base to hold off on transporting the second team in for a moment. Something was definitely not right about this. “Excuse me,” she called up to the one who’d just cast the spell.
From her vantage point, Jane saw her spell blast her husband’s assailant into what was left of the prison’s front gate. Crap, this is all I need. Fatigue had already been setting in before she landed in America, and she had used most of her energy just flying here. If this kept up, she would need to start tapping into her mymior’s energy reserves, something she wasn’t keen on doing.
Judging by the way Sue was glancing back and forth from the newcomer to the people she was keeping out of harms way, she wasn’t going to be of much help until someone told her what to do. Ranma wouldn’t be the one to do that, the idiot couldn’t give orders to them to save his life.
She looked back to where the last lair guardian was, and stomped her foot in agitation while voicing her agitation. “CRAP!”
The entire building shook from the impact, and a second later Jane saw a woman in a magician’s clothes materialize out of nowhere before she stumbled and fell. She took one very frightened look at Jane, then closed her eyes in fear and faded from sight. There was no distortion this time, no warp trail or an other telltale signs of spatial displacement, she was just… gone. “Well, that solves that,” Jane mumbled before jumping towards the group on the ground.
“Hellllooooo anyone?” Debra shouted. “I’d just like to ask something real quick!”
Ranma picked himself up and looked over to the other guy as he was starting to recover. For just a fraction of a second he wondered who the hell this guy was, but then the mystery man disappeared again.
The color turned off again as M stepped out of time for the second time. The fact that the boy, if it was a boy, was still conscious after something that should have put a normal person in traction told him that he wasn’t dealing with the everyday magic user. Either that, or just the girl knew magic, and the kid was something else, a summoned minion or something.
This time he moved behind the girl and got ready for time to restart. At least this way he would last longer. Experience had told him that attacking frozen opponents was bad for them, him, and everyone within a ten block radius. Time started again, and after recovering from what felt like a car crash at 90mph, M chopped the girl in the back of the neck hard enough to send her down.
Sue crashed into the ground and whined as the blow rattled her brain. “Sieth, ay bith my toulge,” she cried out while her taste buds throbbed from being chomped on.
“Hey! No hitting girls!” Ranma shouted before spinning around and kicking the stranger. The man raised his arm to block, and much to Ranma’s surprise, was still standing in the same place after the attack connected.
M reached out to grab the boy’s leg to put him off balance before he moved into arms reach and drew back a fist. “Sorry son, not this time.” Unfortunately, in the time it took M to say that, the boy had time to reach forward and grab the agent’s neck and draw his own fist back.
As the two boy’s grabbed hold of each other, Jane landed on the ground and threw a quick spell.
“Okay that’s it,” Debra mumbled while the battle played out in front of her. She released the hold she was keeping on herself and shifted back to her natural form. A five foot little secretary girl, she could understand people ignoring. A thirty foot plus dragon was a whole other matter!
She opened her mouth to tell everyone to just hold on a damn minute and…
… got really, really pissed off when something slammed into her head from above. After she picked her face out of the dirt, Debra looked at the unlucky bastard who decided now to try for a cheap shot. The woman was tall for a human, at least the equal of Xane, and extremely buff.
As Crush stared at the dragon she had just gotten the drop on, she was starting to upgrade her plan from insane to full blown suicidal. Still, the attack had given her the initiative and she couldn’t waste that. She jumped towards the beast and… got smacked away by a hand the size of a truck before a freaky glyph appeared in front of the dragon’s face and she got blasted.
Now that the attempted escapee dealt with, Debra looked back towards the fight to see how badly things had degenerated.
With no way to dodge, M stepped out of time again and removed his neck from the boy’s grip, at which time he noticed something was holding onto his feet right before the things caused M to loose his balance and fall on his butt. M looked down at the rocks that just seemed to have appeared out of nowhere to incase his feet, and over to the new sorceress. Behind her, he saw that Debra had reassumed her natural form and there was a smoking trench that ran all the way to the wall beside her.
M looked down at the rocks holding again, and over to the ground he had landed on. Whenever he froze time and moved around, it wasn’t like the stupid movies where people just rearranged things how they wanted and restarted everything. What was so stupid was that the movies never figures on the amount of kinetic energy that comes with being pushed into anything while moving so fast time literally stands still.
The whole thing made being hit by a freight train seem easy.
For a second M wondered if he should free his feet, but decided just a few bone shattering impacts would be more than painful enough. He grit his teeth and absorbed the kinetic impact of the fall, then waited for time to catch up to him.
Sue picked herself up as her husband stumbled forward a step, and then jumped away from the trapped human while Jane powered up another spell.
“OKAY, TIME OUT!”
The rather loud voice broke Ranma’s concentration, and he looked over to see something really shouldn’t have been there. Then he looked over to Jane, then Sue, and back to the dragon. “Umm, what’s going on.”
Jane looked over to the dragon, and decided that the universe hated her at that moment. Just a few minutes ago, she had been in the same room as a lair guardian crafted by Exhalation. A lair guardian that couldn’t even take care of itself and would have been an easy slaughter! Now, she was looking at a dragon that by all rights shouldn’t even be in this dimension!
D’bra, princess D’bra, the next in line for the proverbial throne of the dragon race and one of the most dangerous dragons alive just showed up from out of nowhere with her pet human to let the liar guardian slip through her fingers! As much as Jane hated to admit it, any fight against her would be hard fought, and wouldn’t be without losses, those being most definitely Ranma.
She and Sue might have been at the peek of performance, and even older than the princess, but D’bra had centuries to gather knowledge and power in ways other than just growing into it.
Sue just concentrated on keeping the imprisonment spell up, and wondering when her tongue would stop throbbing.
“Agent Debra,” M started before she cut him off.
“Sir…”
Debra looked down at herself, and then resumed her human form, but remained on guard and held a few spells ready just in case things went south. “Sir, this isn’t right.” She turned to look at the dragons. After a quick glace at each of them, she looked over to Jane, she had to be the one in charge. “What are you doing here?”
Taking his attention off the guy, Ranma looked over to the dragon that didn’t accompany him to Japan. “We’re uh… well…” Now that he looked around and thought about it, the whole thing was looking rather ridiculous. “We’re uh, trying to… save… people.”
At the rather lame explanation of what was going on, Debra looked over to the Iron with a deadpan expression. “Excuse me?”
Before Ranma could get the all into trouble, Jane decided that she had better be the one to step in and take over. The idiot’s mouth was probably only going to land them in worse trouble. “It all started when we detected a lair guardian…” she began.
And so, about ten minutes and a few omissions to the story later…
“… and then when we noticed the guardian wasn’t underground and asleep, and this place wasn‘t a keep but a prison, oh I mean, ‘correctional facility’ like the sign says, we were about to leave. Then you showed up.”
Debra and M looked at each other, then back to the three creatures standing in front of them. Obviously, this was their first trip to Earth since technology had been invented. “So you detected a lair guardian without its master, and went to investigate. This prison, which you mistook for a fortress, didn’t have a dragon inside and while wondering what was going on, they attacked you. J’ne jumped the gun and fought back, and it just sort of spiraled out of control from there,” she summed up.
“Well, not exactly, but close enough,” Ranma told her. The guards hadn’t exactly shot at them till Jane started talking, but they had been pointing guns at the dragon. It was close enough in his book.
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(Posted Sat, 06 Dec 2008 05:05)
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