Cam is watching a new recording of Atriama, tail swishing in the gap in his couch, and doesn't stop to pause the show when he feels a summons go by.
"...she's a cape," says the bystander, grimacing as she improvises a bandage. "This means the Slaughterhouse Nine are here."
Does Cam have wifi?
The Slaughterhouse Nine are a group of parahumans who travel the country seeing the sights and killing people. They are very good at this. Ever since Shatterbird joined their method of announcing their presence has been to make every piece of glass in the city violently explode.
The Nine aren't the only capes ever to have a kill order placed allowing anyone who can manage it to legally kill them and collect a reward. But the longer-term members are among the very few to survive having such an order for any length of time. Reading the list of their powers, the fact that Shatterbird isn't the scariest may have something to do with this.
Cam gets aloft again. Shatterbird can fly. Any chance she's doing it now?
Cam overflies San Francisco. He can't do a whole lot about the damage on the scale it was dealt.
Thousands of people flood the streets, there are screams and alarm bells ringing, and a few flying capes. And yes, there, one of the capes has decorative stained glass wings.
And then she slows and resumes flying. Her background reassembles, and she starts looking around for who might have done that. Glass shards speed toward Cam.
Well, they can't hurt him but they could trap him. How the heck did she -? Cam tries various methods of neutralizing shards to see if any of them work. Encased in plastic? Supercooled? Melted?
Melted and plastic both work. There is a surplus of glass to replace anything he neutralizes, though. Pieces are moving fast and from every direction.
Melting's easy to do en masse. Melt, glass, melt. (He makes a chilly layer of air below him so anything that hits someone beneath will be room temperature.)
Shatterbird considers it worse, at least. She amasses a larger volume of glass, several times the size of either combatant, and throws that at him.
Shatterbird can melt. He can't avoid hitting pedestrians forever like this if anyone's got too much of a broken leg to scurry indoors and she could use killing.
The armor supporting her melts, as does she. And she is unpleasantly on fire. This time she hits the ground.
This was Shatterbird's dramatic entrance; the rest of the Slaughterhouse aren't flying around with brightly colored wings pointing at them.
Cam produces, inspects, and burns the current outfits of the other members so they'll be easier to spot from a distance.
Most of them do wear clothes. But trying to just spot them from the sky is a long shot; they could just be inside anywhere.