The PRT catches wind of a strange increase in disappeared domestic animals in the downtown area. Given that the people who live there are the rich and powerful, this is clearly a problem that needs to be investigated and solved immediately. The PRT, of course, agrees that this is of utmost importance, and not just because of precedent about mass abductions of pets, of course not, why would you think that, they are so very worried about Fido, even Scion recognizes the merits of rescuing lost pets.
(Lorica's asked to maybe keep a few more eyes there than she has been.)
Lorica promptly solicits from Glam more foambots. She coats adjacent buildings in a protective layer of foam and sends in Lorica-copies to evac E88, comms Armsmaster to be ready to get out on her signal.
The Empire's in bad shape. Purity's mostly unharmed but she's definitely outnumbered. With Drupe's help slowing monkeys and vines down she's managing to get the upper hand but it's slow going. Hookwolf isn't having a whole lot of success, and has been trying to escape for a while now. Crusader's pretty much okay, if exhausted from using so many duplicates. Stormtiger, Krieg, and Cricket are having Lots Of Trouble doing anything other than surviving, and even Fog's only still Fog-shaped because that's better than being a human. Only Night's been met with undeniable success, though both of them return to human form when Lorica directs them outside.
Evacuation starts but is slow.
Lorica-copies are willing to fly villains out of the conflagration-to-be if necessary to get the place empty stat.
"Lorica, don't burn the thing, I have an idea," Glam says into the comm for everyone to hear. "Windflower, if we manage to evac everyone, I could conjure a containment thing around the building and you could poison everything. Think you could do it?"
"Of course they can," Lorica says.
New Wave has arrived! Not on this scene, they've scattered around to fight other monkey-trees, as have the other heroes. Armsmaster leaves the building and gets on his bike to reach the closest non-burnt-down tree, and after all villains have been removed from the building Glam makes a copy say, for the Empire's benefit, "Get the heck out I'm gonna contain and she's gonna poison the place!" And after they've done it: transparent containment dome.
"Okay, we got a bunch of other trees to do this to, we should move."
"You want to Windflower all of them? ...Oh, of course, you'll just make the containment thing selectively permeable to Windflower alone and check on it every half hour."
"Is the place full?"
"Yeah."
"Then yep, you can just walk right through and a bot will show you to the next tree."
So Windflower walks out.
Meanwhile, the bot flock continues kamikaze and ranged operations against monkeys and trees and monkeys attempting to emerge from trees and trees attempting to emerge from monkeys.
And there are still so many.
"Look, this isn't solving the underlying problem, which is that Blasto made these things. This - this outbreak is a disaster and he'd need a fragment of one of the organisms to start a dozen more just like it. He was using pheremones last time we busted him, he may still be doing that, can we - track those and find him and get him a ticket to the Birdcage?"
"If these things were on purpose he already has a ticket to the Birdcage or worse," Armsmaster says between blows with a dozen monkeys. "If you have a suggestion on how to track him I'd love to hear it."
"If we can catch a monkey alive Miracle Max might be able to reverse-engineer the pheromones and get somewhere with that?"
"Yeah, if I can get one alone so bots can converge on it and lasso it."
"I want enough real bots carrying the thing that if you glitch again it doesn't fall," Lorica tells Glam, "but yeah, help me catch..." The swarm picks one. "That. And mind you keep an eye on the containments for the trees Windflower's killing."
...why would they even need that. "I'm just gonna conjure binds made out of something really hard," they say, popping that copy and creating striped binds around the monkey, gagging it, blindfolding it, and tying it up.
"Thank you. Can you put it in a bag or something, I don't want to discover it shits tree seeds halfway to Max's."