It's the anniversary. Glam would very much not like to celebrate.
It’s their last day on Winslow High—they’re being transferred to Arcadia on Monday—and also their last day without a patrol schedule assigned.
And the PRT released a small announcement on its website about Glam joining the Wards. Now their wiki page doesn’t get erased, of course—they’re no longer speculative. They wonder what it’s got on them.
"I'll ask the other three how comfortable they are operating in the dark and go by that."
Lorica stations a couple of bots in unobtrusive places near the warehouse and they head back to HQ.
Echo prefers not going when it's dark, but can deal with it. Dauntless gets wind of it and is tempted to offer to come with but decides he would be stealing Lorica's show there.
Boots can't maneuver very well in the dark and Windflower is already worried enough about friendly fire, darts or no darts, so a daytime attack it is.
Daytime attack it is. They strategize and decide on a time for the operation. Glam speculates that the Tinker/Master is probably annoyed at the fact that the money disappeared.
They all suit up. Windflower has darts, Lorica's bots have Glam-supplied foam sprayers and decoy friends, Boots has feet, Echo has tranquilizer guns.
Bots report on what they have seen of warehouse activity.
Strange hybrids coming and going at irregular intervals. Almost invariably looking like plant-animal combinations, with varying proportions of each. But for all their aesthetic differences, they don't look all that functionally distinct: low fliers that echolocate, stealthy bipeds that move surprisingly fast.
Everybody who needs one takes a prophylactic.
"Last-minute anything?"
The area closest to the door is empty, but everyone else is—
busy.
The whole warehouse has been turned into a crude lab. There are three desks right in the middle of the open space, with various weird-looking tools. Large crates fill the corners and are pushed against the walls, open, with large metal containers that could be called vats if you squint. Most of them contain plant-like stems that end in hybrid creatures, as if they were fruit. No such plant has more than two such creatures, and the creatures themselves are somewhat foetal, underdeveloped.
Several fully formed hybrids are walking here and there, though, checking up on these vats, bringing substances here and there, filling vats with liquid or emptying them of same.
And one man in a lab coat is leaving one of the large crates and blinking in surprise at the armor-clad heroine who has just appeared.
"Boots, take out the critters." He starts bounding around stomping on things. "Windflower, Glam, poison the vat critters and put lids on the vats. Echo, spot assistance where needed and shooting at things in between."
Glam has started obeying Lorica's order when several rat or bat things start attacking them en masse, forcing Glam to shoot them as they come. The lids do appear above the vats, though.
And after a second the purpose of the button becomes pretty clear as many of the more bizarre creations in the vats start coming to life. Some die before getting the chance to, but a few either weren't poisoned enough or are resistant enough that they manage to topple and break their vats upon waking.
"Windflower, aim escaped poison -" Lorica can hit things, in her suit. She hits critters. Boots stomps critters. Her robots attempt to spray the tinker and the critters who are away from Wards. "Glam, get Echo a gas mask so she can cover Windflower!"
Flying critters throw themselves at the spraying robots, disrupting their aim, and two eight-foot-tall gorilla-like hybrids appear from two out of the way crates. The Tinker reaches one of his desks and throws one vial with a clear liquid on the ground at his feet then starts throwing several other vials with a pinkish one at the Wards' general direction. When the first one breaks, the more bizarre hybrids start becoming much more focused and violent.
Boots leaps over, landing heels first into a couple of critters.
Robots foam! Oh how foamy are the robots!
Windflower contains her lethals, inhaling them safely into herself as best she can when she can't get them into the systems of attacking critters.
Echo continues shooting things and disabling them with close combat techniques when one slips through. Meanwhile, the Tinker tries escaping, slips on a strategically placed vial that had definitely not been there before, and is hit by foam. Glam makes sure that his head isn't covered by it—not that he couldn't breathe in it, but it wouldn't do to have him able to peer too closely at the stuff. His head is secured so he won't be able to move it much, either.
Now they only need to deal with the rest of the swarm.
A bot tranquilizes the Tinker and foams something that was about to collide with Boots's head.
Lorica mostly squishes a pair of vine-snake-things and leaps into the air to get a flier and take stock of the battlefield.
The remaining colossus roars and goes after Windflower, knocking the desks over and causing various liquids to spill, some of which in turn start smoking enough that the room looks like it's filled with fog.