Out With the Old [modplot]

[letsgolegion]

Who| Everyone who signed up
What| The rescue of the NPC Legionnaires
Where| A movie studio in New New York
When| Takes place the same time as "Books of Magic"
Warnings/Notes| N/a

The studio where the Legionnaires are being held is swarming with supervillains. It's a trap, of course. But that doesn't mean they have to walk right into it. They have a plan, and now it's time to put it into action.

The Legion of Supervillains are expecting the non-native Legionnaires to be pushovers. They're about to discover just how crushingly, devastatingly wrong they are.

Comments

[nofortunateson]

If he had the luxury, Theta would just witness. He'd soak in every microscopic shift of Cortana as she moves at blurring velocity even for them, watch her take every last one of them down, because even if he hadn't been born to warfare, he's been in North's brain long enough to appreciate the beauty of a well-tuned weapon turned to its strength. What takes away the luxury is Sigma - the insidious twist of his voice resonating against him like a discordant note, the threat to Delta and Agent York that has him flaring bright the moment it's uttered. There's no simply running away, not now, not in truth since he sent out the first panicked hail on a channel he'd known Cortana would scan sooner or later. She's here, now, something vaster than any of them. She's on the attack.

And she's protecting him.

The finer details of the code are beyond him, but the broad strokes leap out at him, simplicity extrapolated to tight-woven resilience, a mandala against the clumsy fingerpainting of his own work with North's shield in the past. That doesn't matter, because he can see the pattern and copy it one level back, twist it into the broad gaps where North's brain is close enough to his to touch. He can keep studying and copying and bolstering as fast as he can, and even though he can't sense as well with those barriers in place, he can feel the spiral toward threatened burnout slow more with each new layer. A quick calculation of where that puts them and-

"Cortana! Four more seconds!" he calls out, as much encouragement to her and defiance against the Meta as it is simple fact.

[wearethemeta]

It's not something they can hold up against- Omega drops, stunned, leaving the remainder scrambling to throw together a familiar scenario for another Smart AI they'd known. But her pattern and persona is unfamiliar- there's no well mapped routes to breaking or disorientation. The best they can manage is a packet of shell games while trying (failing) to wait out this luminous beam of Fuck You in glowing blue wrath.

Gamma balks, the coward, Sigma cannot spin any lie, any scenario long enough, strong enough to divert Cortana's attention. Joy and terror wail and rail behind The Meta's eyes as a familiar migraine kicks in and adjusts his focus just enough for him to pull in the wrong place.

To grab the wrong thing from Beeny.

A strategic retreat is impossible with so pervasive an invading force- the only opportunity for survival? TO retire. Shut down and leave The Meta on his own. Floundering.

"Next time, little brother." A promise as the fire sputters and dies- if only for the time being.