:Big grey guy is ... attacking the group mind ... below,: Miss Martian sends.

:Miss Martian — are you okay?:

:Brain strain. I'll be fine with rest. But go! [Urgency!]:

No time - 

Green - she needs green for this, there's not enough time for anything more than the instinctive desire to do something about it - threads spill out to wrap around the team save robin (and miss martian), and she flies them down, rushing down to the lower levels. Hopefully this is going to be obvious when she gets there but - 

It's pretty obvious! Obvious sights include:

• A gigantic cavern, somehow carved directly under DC (which is built on a swamp). It seems to have been ... melted with acid, perhaps, or otherwise shaped without tools. It's actually fairly reminiscent of the martian caves that Topaz saw in the dreamscape.
• Also the cavern is lit by what look a lot like tiny 6-inch versions of jumpsuit-boy's pod, filled with weirdly pretty tiny people with butterfly wings and a subcutaneous glow.
• A number of shabby looking buildings, with doors unsuited to human passage. Thousands of beings — ranging from small, wingéd ones to tall, elf-like ones — move away from the location of fighting in a calmly organized fashion, moving in eerily silent synchronicity.
• The fight! The villain (?) that they dropped down the elevator shaft stands at the center of a melee brawl, angrily wading through a dense knot of the small grey creatures. They're clearly trying to keep him away from the evacuations, even as he throws creatures into walls.

The whole scene is silent, except for the big angry guy's shouting, and the thwack and slap and snap of flesh and bone.

Hm. If they look like martian caves, then that's a good chance that it's some sort of obvious convergent telekinetic tunneling technique? Though really, she should ask Miss Martian what the limitations of what they can secrete as shapeshifters - if they can do acids, there's probably a lot of arbitrary biomolecules that might be good to have the option of that they might not know about on Mars. 

She deposits the rest of the team to the ground, and sends a big, dazzlingly bright green blast at his head. 

"Graaaah!"

The beam sends him lurching backward, but doesn't seem to do him any lasting harm.

Kaldur sends a whip of water to try and ensnare him at the same moment that Kid Flash takes off, trying to pull people out of the way of the brute's ponderous stumble.

Ooh she can help with that! 

She sends out a blue strand of light in the shadow of the rush of Kaldur's water, trying to form a reduced weight aura around him to make him easier to grapple. 

That helps a lot, actually. The grey guy may be very strong, but he's not immune to being lifted. Between the two of them, Topaz and Kaldur can get him hoisted into the air.

Until he manages to get twisted around to face them and hawks a loogie of sizzling green acid in their direction.

Oh that is unforunate!

She scampers out of the way as best she can - her experience is that loogies don't have a very impressive effective range and are kind of prone to disintegrate in the air, but giant weirdly well connected balls of metahuman acid isn't likely to be too like that! 

Kaldur tries to grab the acid with aquakinesis, but it slips through his grasp and he has to drop to the ground to let it sail over his head.

The grey guy starts to stomp over toward them — but it seems like Kid Flash has managed to evacuate the area of noncombatants, leaving only the bulky probably-fighters that had been attempting to dogpile the assailant.

She glances over at Kaldur for a moment to make sure he's okay and - good. Probably don't want to let this fight drag on, in case it also aersolizes into some offensive form, but still, that approach looks like it should work in principle? Just need to be careful. 

She flies up a little and lashes out with a braided whip of blue-green, trying the same lightening trick to see if she can knock him down into a position too awkward to spit usefully from - Kaldur's aquakinesis and the bulky guys will be in a lot better a position if she can just get him down for a while - 

Some targeted water-whips to restrain his limbs, and eerily coordinated grappling from the bulky guys eventually gets him settled face-down on the floor, where he can melt his own face off to his heart's content.

Which leaves the situation resolved*.

*The building is still on fire above them (although less so), and now they have two super-strong fighty people who can only be somewhat restrained. And a secret underground village full of maybe-aliens.

:[Dizzying impressions of some complex hybrid of a plan, an intention, and a retrospective]:

...

:[Regret driving an attempt to be quieter]:

Ah, and the aliens are telepathic and Miss Martian has a sprained brain, right.

...Right. 

She winces a little at the attempt at communication - that... probably isn't going to work too well as a way to communicate in an emergency. 

"Okay, any further ideas about what we can do to make this more stable? Might be worth trying to just hit him some more if you think that you can get past his durability well enough." 

She starts fabricating a deminimis telepathic data storage crystal - it could theoretically be pretty useful for dealing with the volume problem and the 'instant barrage of all the information' problem? That'll take a good minute. 

She glances inquisitively at the rest of the team.

"Trying to figure out something that'll help the volume problem so we can coordinate better for the moment - if you don't have any ideas for helping here, there's still the fire on and that's going to take some fixing." 

"Kaldur, can you, like, drown him enough to make him unconscious without killing him?" Kid Flash suggests. He's struggling to figure out a problem that he can solve in the moment, too, since nothing here is imminently on fire.

Kaldur, to whom it had not particularly occurred that some people can't breathe water and that this might be combat-relevant, complies.

Okay! 

She completes her tour of duty as giga grey guy guard - she has an idle thought about making some sort of complicated environmental shield modification with a much more limited definition of protection that helps with this sort of marginal harm infliction thing, but that seems probably too complicated to try to do in the heat of the moment without having practiced it first and also something a little dubious to try when she's in the holding him down business! Still, an exciting possibility. 

When that's done, she eases up her mental defenses just a little, and tries to send the idea of awakening the crystal and sending their thoughts into it, and her difficulty interpretting what they were trying to say. 

There's the feeling like something large moving just out of sight, and then the crystal is full.

Probing it is a lot more manageable:

Living in the secret places under the city, working for their creators — but not from gratitude, only from constraining lack of options. The creators are small, and incoherent, and bad at remembering things. Sometimes cruel and sometimes kind, following no particular pattern. The dawning realization that the creators are actually hundreds of separate people. Making a specialized interface node for talking to singular-bodied people, trying to explain that they want to leave. Even the kind creators can't make this happen because of some kind of weak creator overmind called LexCorp.

Months of thinking and planning.

The creators create a different thing — a strong little creator that isn't part of the collective, even though it contains some of their flesh. The creators have them teach the strong little creator the things that it needs to know, and they realize that not all the creators are linked into the LexCorp. A daring plan to make contact with the free creators: fire suppression systems sabotaged, the interface node placed where the free creators can see it.

Pain — but tiny, a pinprick that is nonetheless like sustaining horrible burns — the interface node offline, the plan derailed, but not wholly unsuccessful: tiny free creators arrive and move the strong little creator out of its learning-sleeping-tube. The creator who expresses the will of the LexCorp to the other creators falling down and raging, more pain, but still abstract as they draw back into the secret places.

And then the tiny free creators come to help and this is excellent! One tiny free creator is even capable of speech! But they are a little too loud, and the speaking creator is quiet now. In the future, maybe the tiny free creators remove their tightly-packed bodies from the secret places and help arrange for them to be in locations where they can choose from between more actions?

Judging this more likely if the tiny free creators know what is happening, since creators are so bad at remembering things. Communicating, but the tiny free creators are so small, and the specialized interface node is still offline because the dermal regeneration equipment is on fire. But one of the tiny free creators can create their own interface node? Maybe some of the creators are normal people with multiple specialized components?

And curiosity, and plans, and contingencies ...

Bug report: this interface node is too small to contain an appropriate level of detail. Bandwidth low.

Okay this is going to take a bit of working... 

So - they're some sort of negligently done biotech project. They get treated at best like animals and at worst like slaves, so they try to figure things out from there. They... don't seem to have telepathic access to the rest of the world? She's got to find out if there's something special in the walls or what have you stopping them. They don't seem to have the concept of the internet either, which... could be helpful to try to explain things? Though that has it's own pitfalls. 

She makes some more of the crystal for additional storage, and tries to convey a bit of an apologetic tone - unforunately, she's not (currently) specialized in this kind of communication and the low bandwidth is intrinsic to what makes it useful for her. 

She goes to ditch the diagnosis power and replace it with a telepathic communication power. 

"Looks like they're some sort of telepathic biotech project that lexcorp has been experimenting on slash enslaving slash developing? They set up the fire to help them escape but I don't think they - really understand how people work in any real detail, and they weren't exactly being treated well, so..." 

She sighs lightly.