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[img]https://i.imgur.com/ziR5Pse.png[/img] [img]https://i.imgur.com/BHScL9w.png[/img] [img]https://i.imgur.com/C7nwoGY.png[/img]
[b][color=FD0000]wordcount:[/color][/b] 1,542 (+3) (+15 for all for bounties) (M&E +4 from colab)
[b][color=SpringGreen]Bowser Jr: Level 14 [/color][/b] EXP: [color=SpringGreen]///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////[/color](189/140)
[b][color=Aqua]Rika: Level 10 [/color][/b] EXP: [color=Aqua]///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////[/color](108/100)
[b][color=Aquamarine]Midna: level 9[/color][/b] EXP: [color=Aquamarine]////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////[/color] (180/100)
[b][color=ea590c]Edward Portsmith: Level 2 [/color][/b][color=ea590c]////////////////////[/color] (38/20) 
[b][color=FD0000]Location:[/color][/b] The Avenger
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A girl wearing swimwear and two lumps of crude metal who’s ends were twisted into snarling human toothed maws filled with guns skimmed across the waves. Around her sailed her twisted sisters, some looking just like her, others deformed and barely humanoid, all of them paling when compared to the terrible beauty of the railgun tailed princess commanding the assault.

Their target was a [url=https://imgur.com/a/y6Ru7k0]luxirouse vessle[/url] that had foolishly sailed into their waters, and yet what should have been a soft target had turned out to be anything but. Onboard the ship, an eclectic force returned fire with arrows, lasers, bullets, sorcery and more, their deadly rain cutting down the fleet’s forces with frightful ease. 

The girl saw her sisters’ bodies shattered, melted, and punctured as they fell around her, familiar reflections suffering familiar fates.

Then she saw her own death.

A figure, unknown to the girl then and yet well known to the girl (or so she had thought anyway) now stomped over to the side of the ship she was attacking, hoisting a massive [url=https://i.imgur.com/80DOGyf.png]fireball cannon[/url] over his shoulder. With a pair of roars from weapon and wielder, the oversized weapon fired, and the memory came to an end.

That one hurt a bit more than the previous ones.

Then yet another began.

Enemy ship girls, sea monsters, grineer troopers, actual full sized war ships and more all put an end to the girl. Over and over and over death came, and over and over the system remade her to be fodder.

There was no towering height before a Consul cut her down, no running away to live a peaceful life in some quiet backwater. There was no story that was her own to remember, because this was it. This, out of so many lives, untold re-spawns, was the only time she had ever been anything more than a pawn with a lifespan measured in weeks at most.  

Next time it would be more of the same.

It was that, not the replays, that was the real nightmare. The lives, real or imagined, blurred together until everything clarified into the sight of a spiky shelled turtle walking away from her as everything she was now turned to ash, rotting away, revealing the infinitely replaceable peon within.

Then it ended with a light slap on her cheek.

Rika’s eyes blinked open sleepily and she tried to move, only to find herself more or less ensnared in blankets as a result of her tossing and turning. She groaned quietly, and then her eyes found the scribbled face of a haunted patchwork Pikachu doll staring at her from where it was perched on her shoulder.

That had really freaked her out the first time it had happened, but now she just moved her eyes down to where Mimi the mimikyu’s actual eyes where (namely in the doll’s torso) and found them looking concerned,

Rika (that was her name, she had one, she’d picked it, it was hers) made a incomprehensible grunt of [color=Aqua]”mnya [/color] before sighing and trying to getting her vocal cords to actually work so she could apologized for waking the mon, only for it to push the cotton filled head of its disguise forwards to rub against her cheek.

She sighed again, staying still and enjoying the moment for a moment, before glanced over at the other bed where a spiky turtle shell lay atop a pillow alongside two other pokemon. A soft muffled snoring came from within the shell, while a bubble inflated and deflated at Dazzle’s nose, and Peeka’s spectral form was clipping through the mattress in a way it somehow found comfortable

She was relieved that she hadn’t woken anyone else.

[color=Aqua]”Thanks“[/color] the ship girl managed to say drowsily to Mimi, sleep coming for her again, before scooping up the little eldritch horror that had woken her from her nightmares in her arms, and cuddling it while she drifted back to sleep.

Her second harvest was fortunately/sadly a much more meager crop of night terrors than the first.

[hr]

In another room, Edward tossed and turned as well (though for him this was mostly due to trying to work out how in the world you slept in a bed comfortably when you had two massive feathery wings sticking out your back) while in a third Midna dreamed of her past life as conqueror of the Dead Zone again, mind drifting to and from battles fought in places that no longer where. 

Blessedly the alarm went off before the dream could reach the fatal encounter with D, but even dreaming of that place reminded her of him, and that was not, in her mind, a good omen for the mission it turned out they were going to be going on.

Edward arrives at that meeting by virtue of operating under military time schedules and sharing a room with a man who did the same, and who seemed disinterested in small talk. Midna got there on time thanks to shadow hopping from her room to the briefing in no time at all after initially running late (her new sea of hair was an absolute face to keep tidy). Finally, Rika and Jr were late thanks to the former soldier needing to badger the spoiled prince into not just going back to sleep after the alarm had finished going off.

The yawning sleepy eyed prince got a pair of wake-up calls in short order however. 

The first was the knowledge that they were going back to the dead zone (he’d muffled Hope’s announcement with a pillow), which he’d only been in very briefly, and had very much not enjoyed during that short stint. Neither had the other Koopas during their varying length trips to it, which cemented his distaste for the place.

Rika had heard about those misadventures second hand as well, commenting [color=Aqua]”That’s the place Papa really didn’t like, right? So isn’t it kinda good that it got exploded?”[/color]

[color=SpringGreen]”yeahhhh, but now we gotta clean up the mess, urgh”[/color] he grumbled back quietly, only for the second shock to really wake him up properly.

Midna, Edward and many others might have balked at the use of infants of all things as detection devices, but for Jr it was the specific infants that he took issue with, namely: [color=SpringGreen]”what, no way I’m going to carry Mario around like some kind of yoshi! Not him, not Luigi, not Peach or Rosalina!”[/color] and not just because caring around his Papa’s worst enemy around in the same way Kamek’s one had done felt a bit like a betrayal. No, the real reason he was indigent was because [color=SpringGreen]”Those babies can walk. And drive! And all sorts of stuff! Hanging out in pods like that is just being lazy”[/color]

That certainly got him some befuddled stares from Minda and Edward at least, neither able to really handle the absurdity of this outburst (also, when it came down to it, knowing the names of the infants just made the entire situation worse).

[color=Aqua]”The sensor things look pretty heavy though”[/color] Rka suggested, but Jr just huffed and said [color=SpringGreen]”If he can swing a baseball bat and get a home run he can handle a sensor thing”[/color] with a level of spite that made it pretty clear who’d been on the opposing team when that home run was hit

Edward coughed awkwardly in an attempt to put anything between that fever dream of a conversation and his own words, before saying [color=ea590c]”Well. Given that without access to magic I will be of considerably less help, I suppose I could handle taking care of one of the young fellow’s… associates”[/color] 

[color=SpringGreen]”Enemies”[/color] Jr clarified pointedly, earning him an [color=ea590c]”I… See…”[/color] from Edward before he went on [color=ea590c]”at any rate, my focusing entirely on the BT detection task will free up other less magic focused to handle the combat side of things, assuming there is even anything alive to fight alive in this wasteland”[/color]

[color=Aquamarine]”If there is, then it's good I’ve gotten better at stabbing things then, because I’d have been useless without magic before all my fusions”[/color] Minda commented, mostly because she had some tangentially relevant info/scheming to provide [color=Aquamarine]”Speaking of: D is one of the Consuls of the Dead Zone, and I expect he won’t be happy about his energy source being wiped off of the map. He killed me in a past life when I was riding high on demonic power, annihilated an army I conjured effortlessly with his sorcery. Those magic suppression fields might let us turn the table on him, if we can get one and some physical fighters close to him”[/color] a notion she grinned with glee about.

There was nothing wrong with wanting a bit of revenge after all, at least as far as the princess was concerned.

With Jr refusing to carry things despite his own magic reliance, and Rika very much on the far end of the useful without magic end of the spectrum, that was all their contributions to the mission sorted out. Which meant it was time for breakfast, a most important meal both to fuel the mission and, for Edward, as a chance to meet and observe the very strange group of people he was now working with.