4871/It Came from the Deep: Pelagic Nightmare

It Came from the Deep: Pelagic Nightmare
Date of Scene:	25 January 2021
Location:	Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
Synopsis:	Unleashed extra-dimensional terrors are fought, Meggan impales Eldritch Horror with her giant spear, Hyperion discovers his Laser Eyes are over 9000, Orbital weaponry is fired, new volcano created, Julio eats a kaiju, Scott is abducted into SPACE!, and Rhodey has a fascinating report to write.
Cast of Characters:	Maxima, Hyperion, Julio Richter, Scott Lang, Meggan Puceanu, James Rhodes

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Maxima has posed:
It is a beautiful day in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Not a cloud to be seen in the sky as the bright sun favors the tourists who come to these islands from around the world to bask in its glory upon the sandy beaches. The blue green waters of the Pacific ocean lap gently against the shore. In the port of the naval base, US Navy destroyers and the lone Ticonderoga-class cruiser stationed here float easily at their moorings.

In this idyllic paradise one might scarcely believe that only a few days prior an eldritch horror long sealed deep beneath the sea in the Mariana Trench broke free of its bindings. Certainly the undersea seismic activity was detected, and there was the large cargo container ship that vanished the day before that was still being investigated but on the whole nobody had any reason to suspect what was coming, not the tourists, not the native Hawaiians, and not the US Navy. The only ones who knew were those who had seen the horror escape with their own eyes and those that they have managed to tell.

The first to notice anything amiss is an ensign standing on the end of one of the docks. She shields the sun from her eyes as she peers out at a strange disturbance on the water, a large bubbling amidst the surf. The bubbling begins to spread to several more places and it is only then that the ensign notices they are getting closer to shore. By the time the alarm is sounded the Lurkers have already lept from the surf and begun their attack on the naval base and nearby beaches.

The first wave heralding what is to come are easily over seven feet tall black ichorous things that seem to have evolved into a bipedal shape with chitinous exoskeletons, like some of the creatures that inhabit the deepest abyssal depths of the sea crossed themselves with humanoid Atlantean frames by way of an eldritch horror.

Even as their attack begins though an even bigger massive patch of bubbling roiling waters starts to disturb the sea further out. Meanwhile distress signals are broadcast across every channel, Pearl Harbor is under siege by monsters that Came from the Deep!

Hyperion has posed:
    New York was one thing. Hyperion spent his days in recent weeks out and about. He'd criss-cross North America at high altitude, trying to find anything different than it was in his home universe but more importantly... trying to find anything the same.
    So it was that he found himself standing atop the golden gate bridge when his hyper-senses registered the SOS radio call from Pearl Harbor...What? Your ears can't hear such things?
    Three seconds later, he was racing out of the atmosphere at Mach 6 and still accelerating while arcing into a suborbital jump south and west. Even at his speed, it's not instantaneous. So he comes down into the atmosphere, first spotted as what might appear to be a meteorite... until he decelerates and stops burning. He slows and studies the scene before him with senses boosted to the max.... no sense in charging in without knowing where he'd be the most useful. So he ends up hovering over the naval base, black costume standing out with the golden cape billowing behind him. It is not that he doesn't want to help. More like he just needs to figure it all out.

Julio Richter has posed:
Julio has been on the beach for hours, waiting for exactly this sort of attack. He is sort of in his X-Men uniform, but he skipped the jacket today -- and the boots, too. This leaves him in a gray, black and green bodysuit, which he can just barely pass off as a wetsuit, making him sort of incognito amongst all the extremely buff surfers. He's also wearing sunglasses, a pair of cheap Ray-Ban knockoffs, seemingly for the express purpose of dropping them down his nose, looking over the tops of the lenses, and giving one of those buff surfers a once- or twice-over.

He is just as attentive and focused a sentinel as any other lifeguard, is the point here.

As soon as he can feel the attackers approaching, though, he throws his arms way up in the air, yells, "VIOLENT MUTANT ATTACK!" then slams them down, the outpouring of vibratory force sending a 40-foot wall of water blasting into the air all along the beach. "¡Ay mierda!" he blurts out, giggling as he spins to see his handiwork, staggering a little bit in the surf. "That's... too much." But it does send all the hotties scattering, which was the purpose, after all. Doesn't stop him from pouting a little at seeing them go, even if he loves watching them leave.

Still, the insistent vibrations being transmitted through the water make it pretty clear even to his muddled brain that there's no time to waste ogling. He starts sloshing out into the water, toward the onrushing Lurkers. He waves at Hyperion as he splashes past him, already up to his neck. "I'm going to go kill a monster!" he hollers with a laugh, before disappearing beneath the waves.

Scott Lang has posed:
"No, look sweetheart I wish you could've come too, I mean, not right now there's a monster...yes we will go to the beach soon...probably not Hawaii...Cassie I need to go, there are monsters...no I'm not making that up to get off the phone. Alright love you Peanut, bye," Scott hanging up his cellphone and tucking it away in a beltpouch. He takes one trip away from New York to pick up some techy doodad in Texas for Hank and suddenly he's the closest Avenger to Hawaii with a Quinjet dropping out of the sky in front of his Accord. Now he sits in the back twiddling his thumbs in full Ant-Man get-up, but with the phonecall done he doesn't remain there long as he stands up and very worryingly for Rhodey comes to stand closer. There was no doubt, he was gonna start saying something dumb.

"So this thing has a radio right? Maybe put some music on. Hey how long till we're there anyway? I mean I don't wanna be like 'are we there yet?' but you know, are we there yet? Cause you kinda nabbed me as I was getting ready to go to lunch and there is no food back here, believe me I checked. If there's time to stop at like a McD's or something I'd be down for it," he rambles on. Even worse tapping his fingers on some of the metal walls of the craft. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Being in paradise would normally be reason to check out all the tourist sites! A walk on the beach in Diamond Head, checking out a tropical rainforest, admiring sustainable agriculture of native plants and giving it her green stamp of approval. Not for Meggan though.

Being the one to play tag with a deep horror by forcing it to chase her east across the Pacific means taking a responsible path in life. Duty keeps her a bit of a distance offshore, hanging in the sea. The US Navy's underwater sonar probably doesn't pick her up but any sidescan would find a humanoid woman doing nothing unusual except breathing underwater unimpeded.

Her meditative posture isn't for show. Currents muddled from the open ocean meet those surface currents running along greater Mamala Bay provide forewarning to her when poison leaches through the brine. Almost immediately she surfaces for a moment, fingers to her lips for a shrill, piercing whistle to signal Julio. So much for getting that poke bowl and relaxing on a lanai! The dark-haired water-witch vanishes under the surface seconds later to play her part.

The first foot-soldiers of an unearthly horror approaching the shallows have their own danger to contend with other than the two men topside. Her hands extend out in front of her and she calls to the sea.

Gravity and the moon have nothing to do with the choppy tug setting the playful surf into more violent downward pulls. Hauling the ocean's immediate mass this way and that creates a murderous riptide in a spreading longitudinal axis that impedes their motion. Sure, Lurkers can swim well, but nothing helps when the swell cycles back towards the deep, creating an overly vigorous washing machine effect. Or it's bowling with monsters as the pins and the ball itself.

James Rhodes has posed:
He knew it was going to be like this. He knew it. But, Tony got called by Someone Important at the Pentagon and was asked to send what he could to help defend Pearl Harbor, and well, you know, he was just busy with this other poltergiest in the Avenger's Mansion so, Rhodey, could you go? Also, can you pick up Ant Man on the way? I think he's in Texas. Get some briscuit from Black's too while you're there, maybe on the way back, or some poi? And that, is how James "War Machine" "Rhodey" Rhodes ended up flying a QuinnJet with Scott Lang.

When he landed to pick Lang up, he laid out the rules: don't bother the pilot while he's flying or they might end up in the bottom of the Pacific. What Scott is doing now is NOT following that rule. And so, perhaps to try and get the man to sit down and shut up, Rhodes yanks back on the stick, violently, sending the jet up very fast. This should dislodge Scott, and maybe send him flying into his seat. Either way, after a moment, he says, "Sorry. Turbulence," and gets back to flying.

It's at about that time that the radio -- the ship has a radio -- picks up the distress call from Pearl. Rhodes grimaces and says, "Hey, you might want to suit up," over his shoulder to Scott, and then starts a quick descent to ground. HE has to suit up as well. He lands a few hundred yards behind where the monstrosities are walking out of the ocean, and lets JARVIS put on his War Machine armor. "Shrink down and get on!" he calls to Lang.

Maxima has posed:
Maxima too has been taking in Hawaii, so different from what she encountered on the East Coast of North America and in Atlantis. The tropics are really quite lovely and she is perhaps rethinking where she might place a potential summer palace on Earth.

The Crown Princess of the Almeracian Empire has been far from idle though, as corrosive as it might be, she has been tracking the unleashed horror's telepathic presence ever since it escaped its bonds at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The cargo ship was over in an instant and there was no chance to intervene, however when the the twisted thing from beyond began to approach the Hawaiian islands, it was time to act, time for round two. That the 'Atlantean' young woman she had met seemed to have similar ideas was heartening. She hoped some of her other friends might make it as well, but this world was full of problems and she was more than prepared to fight it herself.

The massive bubbling at sea bursts upward in a massive water spout as the black ichorous horror erupts from the depths. It just seems to keep coming and coming and coming until it is hundreds of feet high. It's true appearance defies description, seemingly every changing in twisted and hideous ways, with the risk of madness were one to stare too closely. It seems to be almost in a constant state of evolution and flux as it consumes and seemingly acquires the best traits from all it devours as it adepts to its current surroundings.

In proximity to their 'god' the Lurkers themselves seem to take on a more fiendish cunning like there is some link between them. The creatures from the depths continue swarming forth even as they are cut down by the island's defenders though they are not in fact endless. Behind them squirming through the water are more formless tentacled masses of mouths and eyes the size of African Elephants, all of the creatures seem to have only one goal in mind, to feed, to consume, to end all light and all life.

Maxima does her part helping to blunt the first wave. Laserlike optical blasts rake across the sand leaving broken class in their wake as she strafes the charging lurkers. Though even as they are tossed about by walls of water and battered by riptides, even as the first wave buckles, the second wave of formless horrors is soon upon them even as the massive lurker 'god' slogs towards the shallows.

Meanwhile Two of the Arleigh-Burke class destroyers along with the larger Ticonderoga class cruiser have begun casting off their moorings and preparing to sortie and turn their naval class armaments upon the oncoming monsters.

Hyperion has posed:
    Well, first things first. An unrestricted fight is one thing, but there are civilians in harm's way. This leads Hyperion into blurring his way into hyper-speed. Why not Superspeed? Well, his name -is- Hyper-ion, so everything is Hyper. Trademark things. What?
    Either way, he is moving faster than most eyes can track, and as he does so, people begin vanishing. Starting with the bystanders closest to the danger.
    These people are being deposited about a mile back, likely with no clue how they got there. Just.. poof. It's a black and gold streak moving through the area that is making this happen. If anyone pays any attention at all, it's not exactly hard to figure out what he is doing. Saving lives is more important than fighting yet another giant monster. At least that is the priority of Hyperion, no matter what universe he happens to be in. It's a few seconds into this that he recalls that since he had been living in the Avenger's Manor, they gave him a 'guest level' comm, and so he says into his, "Any Avengers in Hawaii, this is Hyperion. I am working to evacuate bystanders. I will join in when I have this part handled."

Julio Richter has posed:
Under the water, Julio doesn't even notice Hyperion has left. He sloshes around for a second, then relaxes, letting the Atlantean spell take effect and breathing as easily as he could up in the air. He swims downward and outward, especially focused when he starts to feel the surge of Meggan's riptide. After a few more strokes, he manages to plunge into it, letting it drag him violently out to sea on an intercept course with the rough beast slouching toward O'ahu.

Anyone with the ears to hear underwater is likely to be puzzled by the "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" gleefully whooped and echoing off the sides of the seamount whose peak is the island they're defending.

Once he's facing off against one of the indescribable monstrosities surging through the water, though, Julio is going to fling his arms and legs wide to slow himself down. He reaches out to embrace the Earth's power, especially potent in this location, and in seconds is wreathed in shuddering green incandescence. "Does your face actually look like that, or am I just high?" he taunts the Lovecraftian horror, before unleashing an explosion of tectonic power so potent that a half-mile column of water in front of him boils.

Scott Lang has posed:
"Ahh geeze, crap crap crap!" is Scott's initial response as Rhodey decides to return him to his seat in its full and upright position. He manages to mostly at least fall into the seat anyway, glaring at the back of James' head for a long few moments after being noting, "That didn't feel like turbulence." Thankfully it does shut him up for the remainder of the flight however little left there was.

As the back of the craft begins to open and he steps towards it he calls over his shoulder, "So how bad did it look? There are no windows back...here. Oh that bad," his question answered for him as he hears the hollers and can see a few of the monsters even from this distance. "These things are going to smell terrible I can already tell," he complains as Rhodey comes stomping out in his armor and gives order. His own helmet clicks into place and for a change he follows order and shrinks down to a speck, gripping hold to the base of some weapon emplacement on War Machine's shoulder as he takes off.

Not that he remains there for long once Rhodey is over the beach. "ALOHA!" he hollers as he lets go, dropping most of the way in his miniature state before suddenly increasing in size to a good 80 feet tall. When he hits the ground he's like a miniature bomb scattering some of the smaller creatures of the first wave. From there he begins shifting back and forth, an easy enough task until two things change. One the monster erupts from the deep. And two, another monster flies past firing laser eyes.

"Oh come on...Hyperion? You might wanna hurry it up buddy. We might have two fights on our hands depending on the mood Space Princess is in," Scott mutters distrustfully. But he can't worry about Maxima too much as the second wave hits and suddenly being giant-sized is little defense against the claws and teeth of the larger creatures which begin to swarm at him. And it was certainly no defense against the 'sea god' churning towards them, the ocean water itself churning and casting higher as its bulk displaces the water closer to shore. Scott begins to retreat back up off the sand, punting a couple elephant-sized monstrosities back into the ocean, but more were coming all the time.

James Rhodes has posed:
And now we're doing what War Machine is really good at: fighting. The man ferries Scott as far as Scott wants, and then when Ant Man transforms into Giant Ant Man, he veers off, around and away from the gargantuan sized Avenger. For his part he has munitions, and lots of them, and he intends to put them to use.

"Pearl command this is War Machine, I'm going see if I can't buy your ships some time to get going." And then, he dives in on the oncoming monsters, spraying them with some heavy, heavy armament. Missiles fly out of their launchers and his mini-gun sprays tungsten core ammunition through as many of the beasts as he can.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Tempests brewed offshore would present more than a few navigational hazards to any of those moored ships, be it an inflatable dinghy to the USS Halsey. Meggan dives into the slipstream of the main Hawaiian Lee Current washing the southern shores of O'ahu, kicking hard to build up tremendous speed and force. Eddies spin up around her, sheared off in her wake to completely revolve around the rising bulk of something just as mountainous as one of the offshore islands. Heaving waves throw streamers of white foam into the air, hurling the occasional slick, black-skinned Lurker airborne for the US military, Avenger detachment, or other friends to use for target practice.

Speeding Julio along to a respectable clip comes as a side benefit of her riptides. For herself, she simply accelerates and smashes into anything at greater momentum if it remains in her way. Armoured chitin or plated sides heaving with ichor matter very little to the woman when she can hurl the weight of the boiling water atop them. There are no words for the multi-jointed tentacle horrors, only that ruthless tearing of sharpened fingernails, the friction of water assisting her in the process of ripping at wiggly claws.

Julio's upwelling columns and the heaving plates might well threaten the whole shoreline with a tsunami, but in part her chaotic screening makes it difficult for the towering oceanic wall to build up right. Especially with the huge kaiju-thing erupting out of the turbid ocean, she has even more to play with after being flung up from a wave and forced airborne along with the bleeding chthonic horror for another free shot from landbound forces. Meggan goes falling back into the Pacific, crashing under the surface. There are bigger problems to worry about.

Maxima's shooting the huge terror, after all. And Giant Ant-Men and mecha War Machines. All the ocean's a battlefield she can turn into spikes and sucking whirlpools pulling at the elder one.

Maxima has posed:
Seconds after Rhodey sends his message, his comms crackle to life with a response from the Naval base's command center. "This is Pearl Harbor Command, we read you War Machine. The assistance is appreciated. Please advise, do you have any further intel on this threat where you are?"

Shrill screams escape the dying Lurkers as War Machine unleashes his multitude of armaments. The discordant sound seeming to echo within the mind even beyond any sound proofing measures. While the seven foot tall beasts may be able to rip a human apart with their bare hands missiles and gatling guns still seem to be super effective at bringing them down.

Giant boots are also quite effective as 'Giant Ant-Man' manages to hold the line of the short kicking field goals with several tentacled horrors. The water where those Lurkers and formless horrors were kicked back into begins to run black with their dissolving forms and what passes for blood as Julio and Meggan mercilessly take them apart and boiling them until they explode with raw geothermal power. Julio's massive release of power brings a rumbling in kind from deep within the Earth. The volcanoes on Oahu are ancient, millions of years old, and have been declared extinct by scientists, but you never know.

Meanwhile Hyperion continues getting the citizens to safety, most of whom are at first very confused, but ultimately extremely grateful. Several seem to confuse him for The Flash, which is an honest mistake really for folks away from the mainland who don't really pay close attention to the distinctions between speedsters.

There is the briefest pause as Maxima notes the arrival of Scott Lang, and is reminded of that power that she now has a great need for, though at the moment there are more immediately pressing concerns and she rockets out across the shallows towards the approaching massive horror from beyond, firing laser-like optical blasts at it as she does. Any momentary relief that Scott Lang was able to feel when her attention moved on from him though is short lived when he feels himself lifted off the ground, Giant Man and all, by a telekinetic field and flung at the monster in Maxima's wake. <<There is no need to hold back Scott Lang. Show us all your great power!>> A familiar voice echoes in Scott's mind.

Even as Maxima and a now hurtling through the air Scott fly towards the massive horror, however, bits of it seem to start breaking off like large flying polyp monsters moving to intercept. How charming, it brought an air force. At the same time as they draw closer to it, pseudopods and tentacles begin to emerge lashing through the air at anything that gets near and a shrill entropic psychic wailing, many times greater than that of the Lurkers echoes through the minds of all present!

Hyperion has posed:
    Recognition doesn't matter to Hyperion. Nor does credit. What matters is the job. The duty. But it doesn't take him long at his speeds, and soon there is a cleared area around the fight and Hyperion comes to a stop in the air before all of the beasts. Eye beams seem like a thing and Hype's eyes glow green for a moment before he blasts atomic power outward. But not in a continuous beam. He fires pulses at one small monster after another. But he does this as he is drifting forwards.
    After half a dozen pulses, he catches sight of Maxima's charge. A grim smile spreads over his face.. and he bursts into motion, coming alongside the flying woman. But seeing the support beasts separating from their master, he points at the big one aid says, "I would be most grateful if you could cover me while do the human cruise missile trick." And that said, he bursts into full acceleration, aiming for the creature's.. um.. head? center mass? Whatever? He is not planning the double fist ram. Instead, he is going for a flying shoulder ram. Of course, he had no idea that Giant Man was en-route when he planned that. It would be the height of irony if he struck Scott first and used him as a battering ram...... but he doesn't do that. That would be mean. Funny but mean.

Julio Richter has posed:
"Pinche monstruos, too fugly to live," Julio mutters. It would be cool if the life-link spell the Atlanteans gave him made his words come out as bubbles, but it doesn't. Then again, he'd probably just get distracted watching them at the moment, so maybe it's for the best. He and Meggan, by their combined ferocity, seem to have cleared a significant section of the sea, so he starts swimming back toward the surface, where most of the action appears to be.

As he breaches the ocean's turbulent surface, part of the roiling quake of mutant energy around him shifts, condensing into a thorn of green light, blindingly bright on mystical wavelengths. He flings this mote of energy at the nearest flying creature, and it unfurls into the form of a squatting, toad-like creature, flint-toothed maw flung wide, dismembered but held together by hungry, chattering skulls. Its squarish overall shape becomes a slab of glowing firmament, a ward of earthen magic that the airborne thing hits with a repellent splat. Quickly, the slab starts to multiply and unfurl along every dimension, becoming a puzzle box to entrap the creature entirely, and then plummets down into the ocean, dead weight.

Unfortunately, that's only one of the big beasties down, and there are more. He's going to need to deal with more of them at once. The water around him froths, and then massive columns of stone burst upward, driven by the pressures he's manipulating in and below the crust. One carries the young Latino mutant up from the water, creating a platform like an impromptu Pride Rock.

Of course, he ruins the moment of majesty by bowing up at the main horrorbeast, slapping his chest twice, and yelling, "Come at me, feo!" His arms angle back and his stance lowers, as he digs deep, dormant pockets of magma rising toward the surface at his call.

Scott Lang has posed:
"I don't know what's going on out there in the water with those geysers and everything, but too many are getting through and that thing is too big. We either need a full army or clever pla...why am I floating?" Scott questions over comms before it becomes a shrill scream that causes a burst of static as Maxima suddenly accelerates him. He shrinks back to normal scale but that doesn't help him escape her telekinetic force as he flails helplessly, and the kaiju unspeakable horror gets ever closer. And then a voice in his head. It wasn't the kind crazy people hear either, at least he thought not. Could someone really tell if they were crazy?

"Maxima?! I am not holding back you need to...oh CRIPES!" Scott speaking aloud despite the psychic connection, not used to trying to talk in his head, his momentary lapse coming as Hyperion blasts by him with a sonic boom. But the thing looked to be pulling itself back together almost as fast as damage was dealt to it, no part of it alas screaming 'glowing red weakpoint' he could see.

Maybe if..."Oh no," he murmurs suddenly realizing he's out of time as he touches down on the side of the roiling black mass. Instantly tentacles and even less pleasant things of all sizes are reaching for him, a look down to the water showing leaping there was suicide. The creature writhes under him and at his normal six foot scale he was barely a bug on its skin as the first tendrils start to wrap around him. Escape, then plan. He shrinks down to an inch high and looks. An orifice. A gill? A mouth? A nose? A...no, he tells himself it's a gill, it has to be a gill.

"I HATE this," he cries out as he leaps inside of it and starts sliding deeper into the beast along slick ichorous passageways, his helmet's rebreather still SOMEHOW letting in a faint scent like an entire sea of rotted fish. He turns the lights of his helmet on, and just as quickly turns them back off, he doesn't want to see where he's going.

Instead he reaches out through the Ant-Man helmet. There were no ants in the ocean but...crabs? Shrimp? He couldn't control them but they were close enough it seemed he could call them and rile them up, hundreds and soon thousands of crabs and other pinching sea creatures swarming the base of the massive monster, nibbling away at its flesh. They would never kill it but they might distract it as Scott searched for some other solution inside it, his feet finally touching down, his light back on as he found himself in some undulating tunnel within the monster. He gets back on comms. "If you can read me, this is Gepetto, I'm inside Monstro. See if I can't find something that looks sensitive," he puts out.

James Rhodes has posed:
The response from Pearl Command gets Rhodey to peel off from his strafing runs, and turn to gain some altitude. "You've got six Mark 45 Mod 4's on those Burkes and Ticonderoga right? I'll do a little artillery spotting for you, Pearl. Sending strike coordinates now. Might also want to launch any ASMs you've got at this thing. It's...big. Little guys you can pop with small arms. Get your Marines topside and let em get some." Rhodey is a Marine at heart. Once he's got some distance, and looks over the battlefield, he zeros his targeting in on the large creature making for shore, and transmits a live location feed to the naval base. All ships and coastal artillery should be zeroed in on it now.

Of course, his higher altitude also gives him a better vantage point of the field, and he zeroes in on a section of the battle where things are not going well, and the creatures look to be overwhelming the defenders of the base. He zooms down and lands with a loud CLANK on the asphalt, and then locks himself into position. He's now essentially a large, immobile turret, and he starts to let loose again with everything he's got on the wave of beasts crashing upon Hawaii's shore.

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Vibrating psychic noise pierces Meggan's psi-translucent mind worse, perhaps, than the others. What makes her stand out so brilliantly to any psychic turns out as something of a curse at filtering the bloody-edged screams from alien creatures wreathed in darkness. She clutches her temples, sinking almost to the seafloor among twisted wreckage from trawlers and fishing nets and a world war, drawing in a deep breath. Down there, no one can hear her scream, right? The paroxysms of pain wracking her body go unseen thanks to dignity?

Unfortunately not.

Her scream echoes the wails emanating from the massive horror blooming like a demented hothouse cactus. Shrieking in the middle of the battlefield probably has little effect at scaring anything. The ones that don't run are stupid, very stupid. Horrorpawns headed her way to swarm her think they have a choice, even the ones the size of lumbering elephants trying to dodge stone columns. But very much a problem for them, not the girl convulsed by the otherworld siren song. The empathic ocean around them all might already be bubbling, but a mystic wave blows out in concentric circles with her at its epicenter. The earth bucking and bouncing under Julio's powers grows even more restless, jagged teeth exploding to skewer underbellies and wriggly swarming limbs.

Glistening blue and green mingles with a few metric tons of sand and a fish for good measure. Sunlight converted into the sizzling outer shell burns hot, hotter as the elemental's wail reaches a fever pitch. Julio's display by banging his chest gets significantly more impressive when an aircraft carrier-sized watery spear infused by all the angular momentum of waves along the headlands and shores of O'ahu coalesces in a vehement, enraged thrust over him, straight for the great, big horror show being pelted by beams and flames and machine gun fire.

That's only the first. The chaotic waves harden into stabbing, serrated arcs that scythe against the thing's lower monstrous limbs. Earth forms jagged tearing caltrops and fine, brittle needles of rock erupting from the druid's raised columns.

Ribbons of golden-green energy churning between the linear constructions of his artful magical creations. Where Julio's is neat, ordered, those explosive bursts and crackles take on the inchoate, rage-fuelled response of nature awakened to smack down something offensive to it.

Maxima has posed:
Hyperion barrels forth towards the creature. It is perhaps unfortunate that Maxima has no intention of following orders or what she perceives as orders, simply weaving through the flyers as she continues to close on the massive metamorphic monstrosity herself, letting those that would follow chase her. This was perhaps not the best plan as they are able to herd her into one the massive pseudopods coming off of the creature, taking a rather solid hit. Hyperion, too, heading straight for the creature's center-mass is met by several more of these pseudopods slamming towards him and the pursuit of many more of the flying polyps unabated.

Scott Lang, the Ant-Man, learns perhaps too late that there are some things you really shouldn't crawl inside. Within the beast he can hear, feel, his suit sizzle as its insides begin to eat away at it. The psychic keening is incredibly intense nearly blotting out the capacity for rational thought as the monstrosity that seeks to consume all begins to consume Scott. It is not that the crabs and other crustaceans do not come, they are merely consumed like all other life upon getting too close.

It is perhaps lucky for the flyers then when Julio rises out of the ocean on his pillar of stone drawing the attention of a large number of the flying polyp sentinels to him, boxing and destroying them with his magic even as Meggan prepares her retribution for her own psychic torment. The massive spear and blades pierce through the creature leaving a gaping hole, though it begins to close again, even as the serrated arcs slice away at the thing. Magic at least seems quite effective against eldritch horrors.

Meanwhile the three readied ships have left the port and begun unleashing their armaments in accordance with Rhodey's spotting coordinates. Cruise missiles fly from their launch tubes one after another slamming into the monstrosity with brilliant explosions of red and orange, but compared to the mystical offensive, the damage when the smoke clears is minimal. Meanwhile many of the remaining flying polyps have also begun to be engaged by scrambled F-35 jet fighters launching air to air missiles and ripping through them with their vulcan cannons.

Hyperion has posed:
    Okay, so Hyperion wasn't planning to stop and engage. His -plan- is to muscle through. He believes himself tough enough to take it and continue on. That is, until one of the flying thingamagoobers claws him along his back and cuts his flesh. They are apparently semi-magical. This makes him veer off from his attack and pull back before angrily blasting Atomic Eyebeams at all of the small fliers that he can find... accelerating into hyper-speed to make this work because THAT FUCKING HURT!

Julio Richter has posed:
Julio's spires, shouts, and sunken flightbeasts don't seem to have the effect he was hoping for at first; reacting to his inability to get the massive thing's attention, he cups his hands over his mouth and bellows, "Figures you'd be a SIZE QUEEN!"

But then Meggan overshadows his posturing, lashing out with instinctive, natural rage, and his volcano-addled brain finally has an actual //idea//. With one more convulsion, the column he stands astride launches him into the air toward those jagged flying spears of rock. Latching on to one of the last with geokinesis, he pulls it to him -- or himself to it, it's hard to tell. The point is that he ends up riding the stone missile, from which he sets about flinging more of those mystical thorns into each shot of the salvo. Where they land, the motes burst forth crowns of thorned vines, his own power ordering, sharpening, and strengthening Meggan's burst of mystical strength, tethering them together into a massively scaled-up version of a privateer's brutal chain shot.

There's only one problem with this idea, and it occurs to him as he hurtles toward the monster, having gone from surfer-ogler to surfer himself. The problem? He is, in fact, surfing this barrage directly toward the monstrosity. "Ay mierda," he mutters, bending deep as though riding a brutal oceanic swell, then drawing on his mystical power to make his body like stone itself.

When the spears hit, he'll be a barnacle on one's midsection, but moments later, he'll break free and start running through the thing's innards, only protected from its disgusting, probably acidic body by a decimeter-thick sheen of magic stone armor. Fortunately, as he has discovered in the past, that magic stone dampens pyschic assault rather effectively.

Fortunately for Scott, his stomping around inside the thing does create vibrations, and Julio can work with vibrations. After a few seconds, he'll burst straight through a heaving wall of muscle next to the Avenger, appearing as a rocky thing of glowing green traceries, covered in so much ichor that the mutant within can't really be seen. His voice, however, can be heard.

"Tell me you have a plan, por favor," the Latino says, panting with exertion. The rolling eyes of the crocodile-shaped armor turn, chameleon-like, to fix on Ant Man, who appears to be... melting. Its head cants to the side quizzically. "Oh. Your plan sucks, ese." He reaches out with one claw to grab the Avenger by... anything not too liquid? Then he reaches out with his powers toward the seamount beneath them. Moments later, his own column of rock spears through the monster, impaling it at just the right point for Julio to hitch a ride and drag Scott back into the open air. Going up.

Scott Lang has posed:
The suit has some level of protection to it, built to withstand, well, generally bad places to be. Still it doesn't take Scott long to figure out it wasn't going to withstand the stomach acids or...whatever this thing had. "I HATE this," he reiterates again just as a stone pillar and a stone creature come slamming in and insulting him with Spanglish. "It is a plan in PROGRESS!" Scott insists as he gets dragged along for the ride, the thing screaming in his head making him both pained, and angry. Julio's barb not helping matters as he starts to get dragged up and out at high speeds. He had to do something of use, he wanted to hurt this thing, it was in his HEAD and trying to consume him. His hands jitter and whether he knows it or not the thing's psychic energy was just not doing good things for his psyche, giving him an almost killer instinct like its subordinates.

Rather without much warning he leaps away from Julio with a cry of "DIE!" vanishing back into the darkness as the rockman exits. Only Scott doesn't stay vanished for very long, as a very large, very gore covered giant man bursts from the top of the creature like an Alien Chestburster, the Ant-Man perhaps 200 feet tall. And STILL the thing wasn't dead even as Scott lets out a roar...that fades out into an oversized grunt as he starts to lose consciousness and topples out of the hole he made, crashing into the ocean next to it with a massive splash.

James Rhodes has posed:
Even in the midst of mowing down baddies, a two hundred foot tall Ant Man is hard to miss. War Machine noticies Scott suddenly bursting forth from the head of the monster, and for a moment he just sort of marvels at what the hell the guy just did. Before he inevitably passes out, "Well..least the ride home will be quiet," Rhodes says to himself, before he goes back to splattering bad guys near him. His work has bought enough time for the 3/3 to show up and start gunning down baddies as well. "Semper Fi!" he calls out, before lifting off to the cheers of the assorted mutants they let be in a Marine heavy weapons platoon, and he rockets off towards the main assault.

War Machine is not much of a...nuanced fighter. He has weapons, he uses weapons, those weapons make his enemy dead. He does not specifically have an anti-magical/space demon/other dimensional weapon in his arsenal, until he remembers, "Oh, damn, Tony's ghost buster ray, grenade, thing..." He scans through his arsenal as he zips towards the gigantic creature, and then, "Bingo!" Over his shoulder pops out a laser cannon of some sort, brand new. He settles himself a couple hundred yards away from the monstrosity, charges the weapon, and then fires a beam of...plasma..nutrino...StarkTech proprietary beam weapon technology magic at the creature. It worked on extradimensional monsters the other night, maybe it'll work here.

Maxima has posed:
Hyperion's eyebeams slice through polyp after polyp as he moves as hyperspeed sending green lasers in all directions and doing quite a good job at clearing the skies, bits of ichorous polyp falling around him, every one a piece of the creature that will never return to the whole, weakened by the splitting.

The creature's mass shutters under the impacts of Julio's strikes as he tears into it with his rocky form attempting to rescue Scott from within, or perhaps those rumblings are from the ocean floor which seems to be growing unusually hot after all of Julio's geomantic and geokinetic activity.

Plasmic forms are a difficult thing, ever changing, ever evolving. Scott's attempt to explode the creature from the inside does cause some very real damage, but a reflex seems to kick in and its form flows away from him, letting him go. While it wasn't as bad as it could have been, that does seem like it hurt the thing, even if its torn form starts flowing back together again. Still it can't keep doing that forever right? Right?!

Rhodey's follow-up with the experimental Dark Anti-Dimensiona Weirdness Beam of Doom (patent pending) widens the damage and there is another psychic screaming keen, this time in pain. Between Scott and Rhodey's combined damage along with the magical assault it has been enduring from Meggan and Julio, the massive Lurker 'god' is finally showing signs of being really hurt and screaming out in pain.

Slicing through the pseudopod that slammed into her with her own eyebeams and studying the changing nature of the battlefield Maxima seems to get an idea watching the warships attempting to pummel the creature with their conventional munitions. Seeing Scott go down, she first swoops down to pluck his unconcious form from the waters of the Pacific ocean. Is Maxima actually saving him? It is an open question, since to any not privy to her thinking her subsequent actions may just look like she has decided to run away and abandon the fight and abduct Scott. A ring on her finger begins to glow and emits a beam forming a portal. Then, still carrying Scott's unconcious form, she moves through the portal and is seemingly gone.

Any thoughts that Maxima simply ran, however, are dispelled a few moments later when a psychic broadcast is heard in everyone's minds. <<Get clear. I will be firing in 10 seconds, 9..8..7..6..>> When the count reaches 0 there is a twinkling in the clear blue sky, like a star in daytime. In an instant the twinkling expands and becomes a massive energy beam as a starship's particle cannon fires from orbit blasting a massive pillar of light through the creature leaving a gaping hole. It's still not down either, but that too looks like it did some damage and incinerated a considerable amount of mass that while take time to regenerate, an opening.

Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately if your name is Julio, the blast also ruptured the burgeoning new magma hotspot gathering beneath the ocean floor as the result of the buildup of energies from the already turbocharged use of his powers. Bursting through the resulting fissure is a blast of lava powerful enough to break the surface of the water.

Hyperion has posed:
    Okay, so either Hyperion didn't hear the broadcast..... or he just figures he can take it. He drifts back a bit and as the countdown reaches its ultimate conclusion, he turns the dial up to eleven. He has been known as the Sun God in the past. He isn't one, but someone called him that when he unleashed his full force. His eyes open wide, and he adds every bit of atomic power he can generate from his eyes. Fusion akin to that of a star also.... he figures that if one weapon is good, two is better. And so a beam that is several meters wide lances through the beast at the same time as the particle beam.
    When that is over, he is just hovering there, staring. He didn't realize he had that much power.... I mean back home he was able to melt a naval warship. Here... by all that is holy. Beyond the beast, a half mile stretch of water suddenly flows in to fill the gap where his beam vaporized so much of that water to steam.
    He shakes his head. Of course his eyebeams had more raw power in this universe. Everything else he did has had more. He just hadn't ever really cut loose with it yet. He feels a bit tired, and sore. Sure, the wound to his back is healing, but pain is something that he is not all that used to.
    He drifts to the shore, looking about to see if anyone else needs a lift, or help avoiding drowning or the like. In the end, his golden boots set down on the sand and he just strides over to War Machine, his voice soft, "I hope that I did not do more harm than good." he says to the armored Avenger.

Julio Richter has posed:
"There's just no saving some people," Julio mutters with a shrug as Scott plummets away again. The massive tectonic forces addling his brain right now are making the mutant a little too blasé about things to give it much more thought than that. But as the Avenger bursts out of the creature and the other Avenger arrives to let loose a carving salvo, the monster's rending flesh seems to reveal a particularly ghastly organ, a knot of quivering gristle suspended in broad tubes that send ichor pumping through the creature's entire system. "Aww. It has a heart after all."

That's about all the commentary he has time for before Maxima's psychic warning is broadcast, powerful enough to penetrate even his armor's psi-dampening skin. The mutant surrounds himself in the same blocky wards that trapped the flying polyps, thus sheltering himself from the obliterating orbital beam. And when the surge of power rises from the Earth below him and the blinding light has gone, he sees that heart for what it is: not just an amusing secret beneath the monster's Grinchy surface, but the crux of its power. If that heart is exposed, unwarded, its magical defenses battered down... there might be something Julio can do.

His spire was mostly demolished, but the top eight meters or so remain suspended, gripped by his protective ward, which he now lowers. The mutant falls along with the spire fragment, spinning with it in the air until it's aimed directly at that hideous lump. More motes of magic, rising from the magma, surround them and infuse the spire-tip, which shines like sharpened flint as they plummet together. Julio and the spire orbit each other in a tight helix filled with green light, until the point of contact.

The spire, flattened into a sacrificial knife, carves out the creature's heart in an instant, and the claws of Julio's mystical armor pierce it at the very center. Then, something absolutely headache-inducing happens. The heart is as large as one of the destroyers moored in the harbor, and Julio is the same size as any other reasonably fit college-aged guy. But he stands, ankle-deep in the OCEAN, and lifts the heart, pierced on his claws, over his head. The chomping mouth of the croc armor gapes hilariously wide, so wide that it's almost flat, and then it drops the heart between its sharpened teeth somehow? And the heart just vanishes down its gullet without the slightest fuss. The perspective and the physics of this process make absolutely no sense from any angle.

Magic, man. What a load of crap.

The croc jaws snap shut, the eyes of the armor shining a piercing orange. There's a directionless shudder deep in the earth, and the beast from the deeps starts to smoke, dissolving into a mist of the same color, flowing toward and being absorbed into the form of that strange and suddenly kind of terrifying crocodile shape. The croc seems to grow ever more titanic, but also more diffuse, not so much blotting out the sky as slowly fusing with it, until there is nothing left in the ocean but a noxious-smelling pile of ichor and Julio, hovering over the slick, unarmored. He intones, in a voice that could rattle mountains, "I think I'm gonna puke."

And then he does. And then he stops hovering and falls //into// it.

Scott Lang has posed:
When Scott hits the water it wakes him just enough to shrink himself back to normal. Breathing and brain function become, easier, but still cloudy as he starts to sink beneath the waves, the light of the Sun growing darker the deeper he goes. And then, light returning, he was heading towards it as if in slow motion, rising from the water which has thankfully cleaned at least some of the gore from his body. This was it then, he was rising to Heaven his muddled mind thought as he climbed higher and higher and then...heaven became the metal interior of a spaceship.

'Why does God need a spaceship?' the Trekkie nerd side of him cried out. Strong hands grasped hold of him and hoisted his bedraggled form to his feet as Scott looked between the two Amazonian women in scantily clad space armor who had hold of him. "Are you angels?" he slurs with a cough as they drag him away to the depths of an alien warship, getting a glimpse of Maxima taking command upon her deck. Oh. Hell. He was in Hell after all he thought before he completely fades for at least a good several hours.

James Rhodes has posed:
The psychic pain, the space laser cannons, the heart carving by Crocodile people...it's all a BIT much for Rhodey. He shields his eyes as the beast collapses, and then, it seems he remembers that Scott is no longer two hundred feet tall, and probably in the path of the collapsing dying old god. He curses under his breath, something about Lang's intelligence -- or lack thereof -- and then says, "No man left behind," before he dives down into the water in the approximate location of where Scott fell.

As he dives he calls out to his AI, "Scan for human life forms, hopefully not ant size because if so he's probably got eaten by something and I am not digging him out of fish poop." He turns on his under water light, and, after a moment, is informed of a humanoid body floating a few dozen yards away. Rhodey shoots through the water, grabbing the man, and pulling him up to the surface. He flies the individual to land, before he notices...this is not Scott Lang. "The hell are you? Nevermind, I'll be back." And he dives back down, searching for Scott in vain, because Scott is no longer on the planet Earth.