Once again, a change comes over the Vespers, the moment that Floral collapses into the water. Both of the grotesque, vaguely human-shaped bee creatures turn fully to face their fallen target, wings speeding up into audible, whining sound as they prepared to take whatever action needed to grab Floral and bring her back to their mistress. The burning, one-armed Vesper even seems to be tearing itself apart in its eagerness to finish its duty, bees spilling out all around it in dense clouds as it prepares to move--

Spoiler: Nope
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You don't activate your powers, you suppress them. What seem like 'active' powers for you are more like controlled releases from a valve holding back the nothing you are able to unleash at any moment. Usually, you move this valve one, maybe two 'notches' to release your power before throttling it back again.

This time, just for a moment, the valve spun all the way open. You closed it again, but the nothing that came out was too much. It hit far more than you anticipated.

Something noticed.


Spoiler: Ariadne
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Within you, Ariadne lets out a choked gasp of mingled pain and surprise. She refuses to elaborate why, but by stretching your senses you can get something of a picture of what just occurred.

Life is a tapestry, filled with grand, bright weavings, interlocking workaday threads, and the invisible, tiny, innumerable weavings that hold the bigger pieces together. Moments ago, a large number of those tiny, invisible threads... vanished. As if they never were. The 'tapestry' is not falling apart from their loss; someone who isn't as attuned as you are might not even notice that anything has changed. but there are... loose ends, which shouldn't be.

All of this is so far off of the purview of what you can normally sense that you get the feeling something much bigger than you can notice just happened. You're only getting a muddy, unclear view of it.


Spoiler: Helios
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Nope's powers aren't magic. You were able to figure this out within moments of meeting him. Whatever he is accessing to do... whatever he does, it goes by a different pathway than the magic you know.

And yet, in the moment that Nope just acted, you sense the ambient magic in the air... lessen. Not catastrophically, but noticeably. You intuit two things from this: first, that no matter where you go in the Dome at this moment, this lessening will feel the same. It had wide-reaching effects, whatever it is.

And second, the lessening of ambient magic is a side effect of whatever Nope actually just did, not the main impact of the effect.


The Vespers are gone. The bees are gone. The scraps of burned Vesper in the fountain are gone. The beestings on Floral, the heat on Helios, are gone. The air in the park is still and silent. The night is dark.

No chirp of crickets. No whine of mosquitos. No disturbance of air from a moth's silken wings. No bottle-bright flash of a firefly. The air is still, and silent.

Spoiler: OOC
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Battle over! Everyone take a Hero Point.

Also, since you've been battling for some time now and grown into your powers, take 5 PP as well!


Later...

Watcher appeared on an emergency broadcast early in the morning of September 2nd, 2018. He apologized to those who relied upon his food stores, but explained that "for the sake of the future", he would not be able to provide the nourishing, tasteless gruel for the next three days. He asked for patience from the people of Forester's Bay once again, and then abruptly ended the transmission. A few hopeful people still gathered where the food was usually delivered that morning. They were quickly driven away by the cloud of insects--insects of all sorts, in large numbers--that was released from the fabricator in their stead.

It is unclear who began the rumor, or how they knew. Even more unclear is why it was believed. But soon, everyone in Forester's Bay knew that the bugs, the lack of food, all of it could be laid at the feet of one of their so-called "Heroes". The one who hid his face and form behind a cloud of uncertainty, who called himself "Nope", as if this whole thing was a joke to him. The rumors would die down, the people would calm, but for now... for now, they knew.

Spoiler: Nope
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Nope cannot contribute successes to the Hero Work Downtime for the next Downtime round. For the next two Scenes, civilians and police officers who are not connected to the PCs will be automatically Hostile to Nope. Nope, take a Hero Point for your Annihilate Everything Complication.