Outside Astoria Power Plant,

Astoria,

Queens

, NYC

Neighborhood:

Unclaimed

City:

Claimed by Miscreant Squad:

Droids R' Us

(Contested by Guardian Squad:

Wildcard Assembly

)

Current Phase Points:

112295

Current Ascension Tokens Applied:

16

End of Phase Two: 27

D:01H:19M:32S

"Everyone in position?" I asked.

"Why does it feel like we're about to pull off some sort of elaborate heist? Seriously kinda feels like Ocean's Seven up in here."

"Is that one of the movies?"

"Nah, they did Eleven through Thirteen and then Eight for some reason, though my grandpop loved the original with Sinatra."

"Ooo, maybe we could have a little marathon after this."

"Guys… come on, focus," I said, interrupting Freakenstein and Pinky as they threatened to knock us off task.

All things considered, we had had a relatively normal afternoon… well, whatever qualified as normal for us all now that we had superpowers and were dealing with insanity on a daily basis. While Freak and Swansong managed to scoop up three more tokens throughout the day, Pinky and I had only added one more to our total, giving us six total extra tokens to add to the count.

It had only taken one extra token to put me over 100,000 points and crossing that threshold unsurprisingly came with an achievement named Six Figures that left me with an A:Tier loot box that I dropped into my B.E.L.T. to deal with later. We dropped in the rest of the tokens pretty quickly with Freakenstein in a constant state of gloating over the fact that he and Swan had collected double what Pinky and I had found.

Granted that was sort of on BrainCraft, but he was testing a potential network array that was supposed to make it easier for them to track future Tokens down on the West Coast. It just happened that the nodes he already had Duskbreaker portal him to place also happened to interfere with our handheld trackers. Since the system hadn't made any progress as he tested it with each subsequent token spawn, BrainCraft chose to shut it down before the last token of the day just to give us a chance to grab an extra one. Although we had no idea if we were even in the right spot when the time rolled around, whether it was just chance or my power influencing something, we got lucky to be just close enough that our trackers pointed us immediately in the right direction.

With no more tokens to hunt and over an hour until whatever insane monologue Axio chose to give us, we decided it was still just a bit too early to call it a night. Well… I had decided that and no one seemed to disagree, something I wasn't quite sure how I felt about but decided to ignore for the time being. Miss Mist had quickly proven just how skilled she was where infiltration assignments came in, giving us way more information on the Astoria Power Plant than I could have ever dreamed we'd actually be able to easily get.

"Everyone knows their jobs, right?" I asked, looking over at Swansong who gave me a nod while a series of quick murmurs of agreements poured in. "Let's do one last run down, call it out," I said.

While we had been successful in taking down Clockwork Tyrant's Pangolin fortress the previous night, to say it had gone to plan would have been a lie. Ever since I had gotten Augmented, it felt like that had been my general experience. It was certainly nice to know I was rather adept at improvising… but that wasn't what my powerset was called. Maybe I wasn't a Perfect Planner anymore than Pinky was a Berserking Boar, but after the events of the previous night, a big part of me wanted to get better at it. It was why I had so quickly gravitated to a book on Tactics after all.

"I'm on comms interruption, I won't be able to do that much while spread out as much as I'll have to be, but I can block out all of the cameras I managed to find earlier. If Hydramental or anyone he's working with are tapped in, I'll make sure they can't see what we are doing. No need to summon backup," Miss Mist said when no one else opted to speak up immediately.

"Pinky will be escorting myself and Duskbreaker into the plant to the room Miss Mist thinks is the main control room. Duskbreaker will be obfuscating our position while Pinky takes care of any droids that get in our way as quietly as possible," BrainCraft said and I didn't have to be near them to see the look he must have given her.

"I can be quiet… I don't prefer to be quiet, but I can be," Pinky complained.

"Wanna bet?"

"Guys…" I said and Swansong stifled a laugh.

"While they are busy with all that, you and I are gonna start tearing through any droids that are in the building, starting at different spots and meeting at the production rooms," Freakenstein said. He wasn't standing atop the building with Swansong and me, but I knew he was nearby as he found every bit of scrap metal he could in the vicinity. "And Swan's on support duty, though she'll probably stay near us most of the time."

"My song can echo pretty well now, I'll try to stay as central in the building as possible," she offered.

"And I'm on coordination duty and keeping you guys focused. I've got everyone's POVs open, if I spot something you miss, I'll call it out," Jon said.

"It's an easy plan but it never hurts to go over it one more time," I said, cracking my knuckles as I looked over the entirety of the small complex the powerplant sat in. "Remember, this isn't just a building in the middle of the city. This is an active power plant, we can't do unnecessary damage, so let's try to keep all the walls on the building. While we're trying to take this forge down, we have two main goals. First is freeing up this node of the power grid, they haven't pulled any blackouts since that first night, but it's not something we can ignore any longer. Second is getting Brain as much time with whatever computer systems they have in there. If he can get a fix on the other forges, we can clean this city up in no time."

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"Hey to be fair, you're the one who goes around smashing everything to pieces," Swansong teased, and I could hear Duskbreaker quickly murmur in agreement.

"It was a reminder for all of us but yes, it's why I'm on the distraction team anyway," I said, rolling my eyes.

"Front entrance patrol is moving now, we can wait 10 minutes or go now," Miss Mist said when we were all finally silent. No one spoke up to answer her and while I would have hoped that Pinky or Brain would have acknowledged and started, it seemed like for better or worse they were waiting for me.

"No, let's do this," I said, setting my jaw. While it might have been nice to wait the extra time, it would have really been pointless with how amped and ready to go everyone was. "Pinky lead them in, give us a shout the moment you get to the Control Room, Freak, that'll be the sign to start the party."

"Don't gotta tell me twice," he shot back.

My eyes continued to sweep the complex, the sun setting in the distance and lights across it turning on. We certainly could have waited until later in the day to do this, but even though Hydramental hadn't done a single thing since we had last seen him, it just seemed like a bad idea to let the sun set on this particular problem when we knew about it as clearly as we did.

"Think we're in for any surprises?" Swansong asked, walking up to the ledge.

"Since I don't want to tempt fate, I'm gonna go ahead and say yeah, I bet we're in for some big surprise that's going to blow our minds," I said, eliciting a giggle from her.

"See, now you're just tempting them to do it to prove a point," she said, giving me a smile when I looked over.

"Maybe Miss Mist is right, we might be messing with Murphy's Law by talking about this stuff," I said with a laugh of my own.

"We're in, Duskbreaker's shadows are working to keep us hidden amazingly well," BrainCraft announced. "We need to get to the second floor but as long as nothing-"

"Keep moving, let us know when you're at the door," I said, quickly interrupting him as Swansong laughed again. I looked back over at her. "See, now I'm seeing it every time any of us talk about something going to plan."

"There's some sort of psychological phenomenon about that, seeing stuff that you're suddenly aware of… I wanna say it's called like, Balder something," she said.

"Baader Meinhoff," Jon corrected, almost immediately. Swansong and I shared a look before I looked vaguely off toward the sky. "Er uh… it's something that gets brought up on the subreddits enough that it's just stuck in my brain."

"Well he is good at remembering random facts," I said with a shrug.

"They're on the second floor now, Pinky has had to take down a single patrol so far. Miss Mist, have I mentioned yet how awesome you are? As far as I can tell, everything's literally on the exact schedules you noted," Jon said, clearly talking to the whole group.

"Twice now including this time," she replied. "I'm not seeing anyone moving to intercept them either."

"Any movement from the printer and storage rooms you found?" I asked, stepping up onto the ledge. If they were already on the second floor that meant it wouldn't be long until Freak and I were up. While our main goal was to provide a distraction so no one went looking for Brain while he downloaded and decrypted as much as he could, we also wanted to eliminate every single droid we could get our hands on.

"Nothing so far outside the normal Clockwork Adapter's that have been on patrol duty everywhere," Miss Mist said.

Since I had yet to see any of them in person, I wasn't exactly sure what to make of the humanoid Clockwork droids that had seemingly taken precedence over the myriad of different Clockwork Animals we only recently had to fight. Based just on the photos Jon had dug up when we first noticed activity around the power plant still, they seemed incredibly lanky and non-threatening comparatively, but I wasn't about to make the mistake in thinking that that meant they weren't capable of putting up a fight.

If these were the droids that were being put on patrol and guard duty, it was only logical to assume that they could perform the job. I had partially hoped by sending in Duskbreaker first, given his lower level, we would be able to make as many of the droids equalize to his level as possible, but doing it that way would have meant keeping Miss Mist from letting her interface scan literally any of them at the same time.

It was a tightrope to balance but by choosing to avoid having anyone go into the printing rooms, especially with the stealthy entrance of the first team, I hoped we'd avoid having to suddenly fight a bunch of level 50 something droids.

"We're at the door," BrainCraft announced. "There's at least three layers of security on it. I should in theory be able to get past it without tripping any alarms, but I believe now may be the time for you guys to start causing a ruckus."

"Say no more," Freak whooped. I could hear the sound of metal crunching on the street below as Freak launched himself up into the air and over the fence surrounding the facility. I lifted up and off the ledge, trusting Swan would follow behind me as I zipped down and past Freak toward a different entrance that he was heading toward. "Wait… I know we ain't trying to cause all that much destruction, but what's the verdict on doors?"

I set myself down directly in front of a set of double doors that had several large chains wrapping around the handles and padlocked together.

"Doors can be replaced," I said, taking in a slow, deep breath as I let Area Sense spread out around me. The doors I had found myself at seemed to give way to a long hallway with a pair of rooms on either side of it. "Just don't be-"

There was a loud BOOM from the far side of the building and I let out a short sigh. I was going to have to remember that if given the opportunity, Freakenstein was always going to take the option that let him kick a door in. Only a moment later, an alarm began sounding and I knew I was wasting time standing around for no reason. I looked back toward the locked shut door before launching a relatively weak Gravity Punch at it.

Even if I couldn't use the Limit Breaker Augmentation on it any longer, the Attraction Augmentation it still had meant even at just 5% of my stamina, there was still going to be a knockback. The doors lurched backwards, yanking against the chains before bouncing back, clearly resisting the blow. Finding that just a bit frustrating, and not wanting to waste more Stamina than I needed, I backed time up by just a few seconds. Since I had barely had any reason to use my Time Bank the entire day, I was sitting on almost the entirety of my reserves and fully intended to use it for anything that might have gone wrong during this particular mission.

The second time around, I bumped the punch up to a 10% Gravity Punch. While the chain still didn't snap, the hinges holding the doors to the wall weren't quite as resilient and the doors skidded backwards before falling flat onto the ground with a big THUD. The lights in the hallway were on the brightest setting they could be at, probably in an attempt to eliminate as many shadows as possible to weaken Duskbreaker and the hallway felt almost clinical with how barren and pristine it seemed to be.

Well… pristine if you weren't counting the small army of droids that were racing up the hallway right toward me. As I highlighted them, with the exception of two large Gorillas at the rear of the pack, they were all Clockwork Adapters ranging from Level 18 to Level 21. I could see at least a dozen of them, all still just barely out of the range of my Local Area as they charged. It wouldn't take them long to get into it, and the narrow hallways was certainly going to be too small to try all of my new abilities out, but I'd just have to take the fight to them.

To that end, I couldn't help myself as I reached up and cracked my knuckles again, strolling into the hallway just as Swansong began to sing.

"Welp, looks like the distraction worked... time to crush some droids."

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