Heroes: The Road of Good Intentions

[SirNitram]

"Didn't even know this timeline had liquid lifeforms." Gravitas said absently. "Doesn't look like it's trying to kill us, so that's a step up from earlier."

[General Havoc]

Yes, she was trying to confuse the water-being more.

She succeeded.

A chorus of gurgling sounds greeted this statement, and the mass of water raised and twisted its tendril about somewhat, as though considering what the shadow creature was saying. When it replied, once again through harmonized sounds within the water, it had a distinctly stentorian tone.

"Flesh-being... nonspecific... beast implies organic life-form within the 'animal' Kingdom. Beast carries no implication regarding sentience. You do not reflect botanical specimens I am familiar with. Are you protozoa?"

The water thing waited patiently for an answer, having quite honestly meant the question.

[SirNitram]

Gravitas simply shook his head. "Animal, biped, mammalian, subsection of homo sapien." He said simply. "Not protozoa. Sorry. Beast has some odd connotations for some."

[LadyTevar]

Her turn to be shocked and surprised as the being innocently asked the question. It was like he was a child! Her hesitation gave Gravitas the time to answer, showing to the rest of the team this little problem could be talked into submission.

[General Havoc]

The water thing bubbled for a moment as it (apparently) considered what was being said.

"Fascinating," it finally said, and it slithered slowly towards the three figures, the shadowy-dragon thing most of all. "All of you are homo sapiens?" It did not wait for the answer, reciting a long string of words that sounded Latin. "Animalia, cordata, mammalia, primates, hominidae, homo sapiens..." The before was not a question, merely a recitation, as though the thing was dredging up information from a long time ago.

"Homo Sapiens are flesh beasts." it, or rather he said, quite definitively, "sentient flesh beasts, intellectually dominant species on this planet." The thing was now looking (sort of) at Argent, clearly fascinated.

"This one is not bipedal, and does not possess the characteristics of homo sapiens flesh beasts. Your structure is not... fleshy. A gelatin-beast? It hesitated and then spoke animatedly.

"Scyphozoa!" it exclaimed suddenly. "And hydromonoxidic-deficient! The Pyronic lifeforms must have been experimenting, how horrible!" And then without an instant's warning, the water thing reared up and launched a globule of water the size of a beach ball straight at Argent at speeds that would definitely impact, though not fast enough to actually cause harm.

What the hell it was talking about was anyone's guess.

[LadyTevar]

Argent didn't understand a word of what he said, but she did understand water balloons. When someone throws a water balloon at you, duck. Thankfully, due to the earlier fight, and the Water-being's own path of destruction, there were a lot of shadows about.

Thus, as soon as the water was lobbed her way, she sank into the shadows at Blackheart's feet, the dragon-shape instantly amorphic and vanishing into the shadow.

[SirNitram]

"....She wasn't dehydrated." Gravitas said absently. "Our species is only seventy or eighty percent water. You don't have to pelt us with additional hydromonoxide." The man with the PhD rubbed his face.

[Charon]

Legacies only looked at the creature with a look of disinterest. "So do we kill it yet, or is it, like the monk and angel, not with the demons..."

Legacies looked around, eager to get back to the business at hand, which was not supposed to be conversing on matters of dehydration with amorphous beings.

[General Havoc]

The water-thing hesitated, and appeared almost perplexed as Argent vanished, though it did not "look around" for her. The water globule it had flung exploded on a large collumn and splattered all over the surrounding area, before the water droplets involved began to slowly run and coalesce back together, slithering towards the main water formation

"That was... unexpected," it said. "But... your species is not in question. Scyphozoa require immersion within Hydromonoxidic solutions or they may perish from dehydration."

It waited a few more moments and then turned its tendril to the flesh-beast that had addressed it. "Where did the Scyphozoic-beast go? It could not have dissolved..."

[SirNitram]

Now Gravitas was soaked. Fun. "It's a subnoetic deviance from the main genetic line, in her case. I'm so glad Eufiber dries quickly.." He complained.

"Leave it be, Legacies. It's not hostile. Just confused about what we need to survive."

[Marcao]

There was something remarkable about half holding Argent. It was the lack of apprehension, the lack of doubt that surprised him. It felt completely natural to him and that others could see it bothered him little if at all. Even with his physical closeness to Argent however and his relative attention to his surroundings, he was unable to pick up on Blackheart’s apparent jealousy. The leader of Team Mirage turned away and began to walk and he hesitated for only a moment before he followed the woman he cared for so much still in his arms. He felt Argent wince, but assumed that it was due to physical discomfort, his left hand lightly brushing against her hair in a reassuring fashion.

Her words a moment later were met with a soft sigh. “They don’t waste much time do they.â€

[LadyTevar]

Argent was also having a bad time with the high Latin words thrown about. She manifested herself behind the waterbeing. "I am not Schizo, or sci-fi, or whatever you're saying," she griped, her draconic head lowered and silver eyes glaring.

"If you want Latin... fine, Homo Sapiens daemos." She snapped, reverting to her true humanoid form ... which meant the one that everyone on the team knew, two quite intimately.

[Hotfoot]

Hotfoot blinked as the new...thing came into view. A giant blob of water. He flared his shield a little, not sure exactly how this would play out. Every time he had been splashed in the past, the water turned into steam around him, but he had never tried completely immersing himself.

The conversation continued in the continually slow pace. He frowned and quickly wrote on the wall "WTF? FoF?" The blur of flame that was Hotfoot waited for a response, but he kept his eyes on the water thing. How many new "allies" were going to be found in this place?

[LadyTevar]

It was hard to miss fiery writing on a wall in here. It was also fun to watch (in slo-mo for Hotfoot) a shadow scratch out 'power down and find out!'

[General Havoc]

The creature reacted as more of the flesh beasts began to approach, and seemed to jink slightly as Argent re-appeared in her draconic form. The tendril atop the giant mass of water twisted around, snaking around the dragon-thing's long neck as it stared at her.

"Scyphozoa" it corrected, not sure apparently what the jelly-thing had meant initially. "Aquatic, gelatenous, flesh-beasts. Are you not one of those things?"

The gellatin thing replied by giving its latin name and then morphing into a human. A female human. The water-thing posessed no eyes or facial features, but it bubbled in clear surprise and withdrew a pace or so.

"A metamorphic flesh-beast!" it exclaimed, or sort of exclaimed, through the sounds of boiling water. "Fascinating! A subspecies perhaps? Or a mutant, as that one claims?" It pointed its tendril at Gravitas, and then stopped, and froze.

Literally froze.

Ice crystals congealed spontaneously within the water-mass, and it seemed to loom upwards, darkening as the ice disturbed the light that passed through it. Its tendril thickened, its mound broadened, and it brought it's "face" around towards the flaming blur of fire that had just come into view. Half-slush, half water now, the ambulatory mass of liquid bubbled and cracked in a threatening tone, and weaved its tendril back and forth, "staring" as it were, straight at the fireball.

"Pyronic..." it said, with a deep, ice-breaker's voice, like the sound of a glacier cracking, or an iceberg ripping through a ship. It lowered its tone even further to a low rumble of sound, within which only two words could be discerned.

"Fire-beast...."

[SirNitram]

"You will not harm him." Gravitas spoke. None of the Quantum energies of his body aided it, but it was still a voice honed to sway nations. "He is not an enemy. If you are not, we will assist you in escaping. If you are an enemy.. I will demonstrate why even an organism like yourself cannot survive being compressed through a microsingularity. I am Gravitas. And you will hold fast."

[Charon]

Legacies reaction was fast, tendrils lashed out and wrapped around the air violently, his height grew, and spikes of silver launched out, passing just infront of the water creature.

For now it looked like the others were intent on communicating with the creature, that was all that stayed Legacies hand, even if it would do little more but inconvenience the water creature.

[Cynical Cat]

Blackheart ran his fingers through his water messed hair. "Legacies, stand down. I don't think fancy water balloons mandate a lethal response."

[Hotfoot]

Hotfoot sighed as Argent got to "down" and snapped the shield off, glaring at the growing patch of water, a clearly annoyed look on his face. "Oh yeah, he looks real damn friendly," He glared at the water thing and flipped it the bird. "Listen pal, you're down here in a whole batch of unfriendly, and I'm right now not very trusting," He shot a glance at the angel and the holy man. "You wanna go down, we'll rumble, but it's gonna end in a whole lot of steam and unpleasantness. Or, and here's a thought, you calm the fuck down and we all walk out of here with our bodies and egos intact after we kick some demon ass." He didn't like being out of his shield right now, every second he spent in the real was a second he could be ambushed, shot, knocked out, or torn to pieces, and most of those had already come close to happening when he was sped up.

[General Havoc]

The water-creature took absolutely no notice (or at least no visible notice) of the tendrils that errupted into existence. It did not back down when Hotfoot's flaming shield vanished into nothingness, nor did it bat an eye (not that it had one to bat) at having the bird flipped at it. What seemed to pull the beast down was the speach.

The flesh beast that had spoken to him initially now spoke again, but its words held power and command within them, and the water monster backed down as ordered. The ice thawed, the figure contracted sligthly, and resumed its translucency.

For a few seconds afterwards, the water pile did not speak or move overtly, gurgling softly to itself as its tendril turned around and around. After a while, it finally merged its bubblings into words once more, words that sounded a bit more serious than before.

"You are... all flesh beasts?" it asked. "Not fire beasts or Scyphozoa? Homo sapiens superior?" It seemed unclear as to what it was talking about.

"What are you all? And what are you doing in this place?"

[LadyTevar]

"Yes, we're all homo sapiens superior," Argent answered. That phrase she knew, even if she didn't like it. There were many on the wrong side of the law that used the term to justify what they did. "We are here because RCE needs stopped. Who are you, and why are you here?" She politely left off the 'what are you' question.

[SirNitram]

"Homo Sapiens Novus." Gravitas corrected. "In my case. We are not, in fact, jellyfish."

[General Havoc]

The creature's tendril slowly turned back and forth, fixating on each of the other figures in turn as it rolled and gurgled various sounds within itself, its surface rippling like a pond into which a pebble had been thrown. The only intelligible terms from the bubbling sounds were the letters "R. C. E.", spoken slowly and with thought behind them, as though they were unfamiliar.

"I am Dihydrogen Monoxide," it said, apparently answering both the "who" and unstated "what" questions with the same answer, though it wasn't all that informative as to the latter. It considered the looks on the flesh-beasts' faces for a moment and added "You may call me 'Hydro', if you like."

The water creature casually slid over to an office printer and extended a second tendril from itself and into its workings, pulling out the ink cartridge and sucking the ink out of it, dying itself a watercolored black just for a moment before the ink concentrated itself into a tight region near its surface and was expelled a a glob of thick black sludge which splattered onto the floor like a bowl of pudding, all of the water in the ink having been leached out of it before expulsion. Immediately, the thing's color returned to clarity.

"I do not know for what purpose I am here. The pyronic entities were performing 'experiments'..." A low rumble, like a geyser threatening to burst, attended the word 'experiments', and the creature darkened slightly as it chilled.

"My restraints lost their power moments ago, and I destroyed the equipment that was withholding me. Please, who are you, flesh-beasts? And what are you doing in this place? Homo Sapiens Superior are... I have not seen any here before..."

[LadyTevar]

Argent looked to Blackheart, then to the rest of the team, then back to 'Hydro'. "Some of the ... experiments ... they do here were allowed out to cause havoc. It seems they are created just for that purpose. We are here to stop the experiments, and shut them down." Short, easy, to the point ... and worded in a way to make Hydro more likely to ally with them.

"You may call me Argent," she continued. "This is Blackheart, and Gravitas, and Tachyon ..." she introduced the team one by one, finishing with the Angel and the Monk. "We just fought two of the ..." she paused on 'demon', went for Hydro's term for them instead, "... pyronic? That might be what broke open your restraints."

[Hotfoot]

Hotfoot calmed down a little as the water...thing settled down a bit. "Yeah, by the way, I'm not one of these 'Pyronic' guys. At least not the last I checked. I mean, yeah, pyro, fire, I get it, but I'm just a metahuman. I go fast. Fire surrounds me. That's it. Now if you'll excuse me, we're still in the middle of enemy territory here, and we can save the talking when we're far, far away from here. Meantime, I say we smash up as much of this place as we can, grab what CDs, DVDs, or jumpdrives are hanging around, if any, and initiate operation Golf Tango Foxtrot Oscar. Now, if you don't mind..."

And with that the shield was back up, and Hotfoot was zipping around the area. His shield was on a lower intensity than before, as he was looking for any clues that could be had and didn't want to incinerate anything that could be useful.