"I'll distract them. And keep them down once they think they know what's going on. Can you get me near them like Trickster would do it?"

"Yes." She calls up the relevant shades. "Are you ready?"

"Ready."

She waits a moment until the heroes pass an appropriate trash can, then swaps it for Cherish, and conjures a burning orb in front of them.

One of the heroes suddenly thinks she's extremely distracting, and the other doesn't literally mistake her for his younger sister but reacts as if he had. No time to come up with something more original. Both rush to pull her away from Sundancer's sun. She lets them.

They start looking around for the Travelers, confusedly so after the first time Keres swaps them. Probably means they've called it in. So some complete hopelessness and despondency, always a good standby when you want someone to go inactive. Bit of an effort to maintain, though.

"They're down. Do you have anything to get their comms disabled?"

Does her systems tinker have any insight?

Yes, they can be silenced by taking the microphones and stepping on them.

She had already thought of that herself, she was wondering if there was a less obvious approach. But whatever, the direct route works.

Now for the bit where they have to move two prisoners, one of them heavily armored. "The plan was to get a ride from Shatterbird, but if they already know we're here you could just go all Crawler again. Probably."

She checks that they do actually know that. Interrogation is so much simpler when you can skip straight to the "gibbering wreck" stage and they can't think of lying. It's less know than suspect, but that's probably close enough.

Crawler form it is. She's more than strong enough this way to move everyone.

The heroes aren't physically restrained, but for some reason they don't feel like doing anything other than holding on for dear life.

Cherish suggests using Trickster's power for the last bit, in case anyone was following the highly visible Crawler.

She de-shifts from Crawler before doing that. Things of that size are easier to notice being displaced.

There are mostly human-mass sandbags lying around with an open line of sight. Presumably for Trickster's use. Swapping the heavily armored hero is harder and less accurate, but the counterweights get as big as some of Genesis' forms. It'll do.

Is anyone else back yet?

Jack and the Siberian are. They've brought in a cape in a black and white mask. He's badly injured and Jack occasionally cuts him again. (He promises there's a reason but it's not  obvious what.) The group that went after the Teeth managed to get the force field generator by the simple expedient of blasting glass around until it broke all the force fields. They did get recognized and killed people on the way out, but none of them was Butcher. Bonesaw arrives shortly after Ellie and Cherish, with Blasto being carried unconscious by one of his own creations.

Their own prizes are apparently Adamant, a short-range metallokinetic who uses it to essentially give himself power armor, and Hunch, a precog of some kind. The name might be an admission that he's unreliable or just a self-deprecating reference to his humpbacked appearance.

They'll be able to find out soon enough.

Best get to cloning if they want passable doubles.

No double will fool Accord. The heroes probably have ways to detect impersonation; the first pair of clones will be able to say whether they could pass with Bonesaw's help. Fooling the Teeth could work, if it weren't completely implausible that Vex would escape from the Nine. Blasto they can straightforwardly replace. 

But they don't actually need to sabotage from the inside. A supremely powerful psychological weapon can do a lot even without impersonating anyone. To cloning!

And hopefully they're not immediately hostile?

Jack had to make it clear they don't plan to kill any of the clones. Their other goals are to defend Noelle and wreak some targeted havoc, and as far as they know Noelle is an ally of the Nine.

(Doesn't mean they can't kill clones, but not until they don't need any further cooperation. On the way out at the latest.)

The Adamant and Hunch clones do think they can pass for the originals if Bonesaw corrects the deformities. They'd need a plausible way to have gotten less captured... (Cherish suggests saying the Nine have a master with them who can hijack people's bodies, and that Hunch guessed at how to block it with an appropriate metal hat.) The heroes' source is probably evil Burnscar, evil Hunch thinks, but a good enough impersonation should work even if the heroes know what to look for.

So they could send the hero clones off to do some inside sabotage. Does Bonesaw need any potion-based help with the surgeries?

Not really, but she's happy to have it. Too bad they still need the original Blasto for making clones of.

The end results look indistinguishable as far as any of the Nine can tell. At Hunch's suggestion, they make another who won't go in. They could use the extra precog cover.

And when they're on their way with suggestions about priority targets, Jack gives Shatterbird the signal. No glass anywhere here? Good.

Her drones are hardened against that. It seemed a natural precaution.

It's a high note, rising continually higher and louder than Shatterbird herself could sing. Seen from above, it looks like a cloud of broken glass billowing out from below her. There aren't very many capes who are on par with a natural disaster in their own right, and Shatterbird takes pride in being one of them.

It doesn't last very long. Each window pane or television screen can only transmit the sound for so long before it explodes. The cloud turns into a ring, and continues expanding until nearly everything glass in the city is shattered.

And the Nine have officially arrived.

Yes, very impressive and certainly demoralizing for the enemy. (But she's here because Jack promised parahumans to kill. Spreading terror and fear is more of an incidental thing.)

The easiest and most anticlimactic way of doing that would be to accept an invitation to the inevitable truce meeting and just kill every non-clone at the table. Has she checked whether she can use her death touch through a Genesis projection? If not they could disguise her as Sundancer for a little while. The Othello clone is spying on the Ambassadors and can tell them when and where...

If they go that route they'll have to create some spectacle later to make up for it.