[M&M 3e] Defying the Future IC

[Zelphas]

With a plan in place, and various levels of apprehension in your minds and hearts, you leave the coffee shop without ordering anything--which may be for the best, since where exactly a nameless hole-in-the-wall is still finding coffee beans after nearly three months of total supply cutoff is perhaps a question that no one would like the answer to.

---

Watcher's birds can guide you to within a mile of Manchineel's location, but by the time you're maybe two miles away from her, you no longer really need his guidance. The ground beneath you, uneven and sometimes treacherous as any forest floor, has slowly leveled and flattened, carpeted with eerily similar leaves in repeating patterns of yellow, orange, and red. The trees have steadily grown straighter, taller, their branches beginning higher on their trunks; soon, it is nearly impossible to tell one tree from another of its kind, and the trees repeat in a pattern, forming columned paths, their roots tracing another, harmonious pattern beneath the fallen leaves. The canopy above, only lightly shifting from the autumn wind, is spaced far too evenly, the branches obliging one another and leaving careful, symmetrical gaps between the similarly-sized leaves. When the sun makes its brief forays behind the clouds, it reveals a third pattern on the forest floor, drawn in the dappled light that glimmers through the leaves and outlined by the spaces between.

In a painting, or a picture, or even a movie or show, the effect would be beautiful. Standing in its midst, disturbing the even leaf-fall as you walk or causing it to tremble in your flight, it feels alien, nature filtered through a strange mind rather than allowed to grow as it wishes. The sense of alienation builds as you move farther towards its source, and it is clear that you are intruders to this space--or perhaps it is life that intrudes upon this space, life that is messy and unchecked and random, trampling the patterns and tossing the leaves. Whatever it is, Manchineel has stamped her pattern heavily into this place, showing her picture of Nature clearly, repeatedly, again and again.

The unnatural woodland before you opens, the colonnade of straight, still trees bowing outwards, then inwards in eerie unison, leaving an open space in the heart of the symmetrical world. At the far end of this perfect clearing stands an enormous boulder, covered in a thick bed of clover. All of the stalks of clover seem to have four leaves. As the four of you arrive, the boulder shifts, turning towards you and revealing the wrinkled, clover-clad head of a tortoise, which observes you with flat calm, chewing a mouthful of dried leaves. An odd skittering sound reveals a second occupant, scrambling down the side of one of the unnatural trees to the forest floor. The shape of the creature is oddly difficult to discern, for a moment, too many limbs and abdomens and trailing feelers, but it at last resolves itself into a creature that could not, naturally, exist. The bottom section of the creature is the circular body and eight long limbs of a spider, grown somehow to rival a human inside, made of plates of chitin and cords of dark, root-like wood. Where the spider's head should be, there is another bug-like abdomen, this one long, thin, and upright, surmounted by a triangular head with two bulging, milky yellow eyes. Another set of limbs branch out from this abdomen; oddly flat and wide, the sun gleams off of these limbs like metal, flashing as the creature fixes its gaze on the four of you. The entire put-together beast is covered in thick, damp-looking moss, which floats lightly in the air and follows its limbs as they twitch; the rich, wet scent of rainfall reaches you as the creature makes itself known, shivering and shuddering with odd convulsions.

"She'll die by sunset, I'm afraid."

Manchineel is here.

The smell of rainfall is soon overpowered by her, a sweet scent containing just too much sour to be pleasant. She steps out of the same tree the spider-mantis crawled down from, and the air shivers with her presence, a shimmer that is strangely unhealthy even as it bespeaks nature and power. Manchineel lays one reddish-brown hand atop the creature's head, the touch of the rough bark stilling the creature's twitches for just a moment. "I didn't have the time to perfect her, and even nature needs perfection." Her green-white eyes, pupilless, without iris, are sad as they gaze upon her creation, noting it beginning to twitch and shudder once more. "I would rather she live, and find her place--spiders are so useful, and the praying mantis is endangered, so why shouldn't they find a place to be, together? But I do not have the time. Or, perhaps the skill."

Her hand still upon her newest creature, Manchineel turns her head, the pale green arrow-shaped leaves that make her long-long hair whispering about her. The soft, greyish mold that forms a sort of dress around her pulses and shifts as she looks upon the four of you--or, especially, on Lily. "I was foolish, with you, I think." Her voice is barely above a whisper, but the woods are silent to hear her speak. "Foolish, and short-sighted, and arrogant. I only saw the hurt, the pain, the anguish of the plants as they came to me--they speak, but you know that. I thought that the Woods spoke through me, that their voice was clear, powerful--foolish, arrogant. Even nature needs perfection. If I claim to speak for nature, how can I exempt myself? Join me, my Raphael. Teach me, show me where I have gone wrong. Let me perfect you, so that you may perfect me, on and on, until the world is right once more."

Manchineel drops her hand from the spider-mantis, walking towards the center of the clearing, her bare, bark-like feet making no sound and disturbing no leaves on the forest floor. Those green-white eyes move, looking upon each of you in turn. She smiles at Nope. "My Uriel. So fearful, so strange, unknown to even yourself. Let me give you a body that you may know, and people who will always know you. All I ask is that you go unknown to those who would deny perfection. I can... I can give Ntombi her rest, this way, which is better." She shakes her head, leaf-like hair rustling, then looks at Ariadne. "My Michael--or Michaela? You are a stalwart defender, a spear and a shield, a weaver of nature, though what you weave is stripped of much of its true power and form. Let me strengthen your shield and sharpen your spears, perfect them to Nature's true form. Let me shelter behind your shield, my protector." Helios is next. "Gabriel. Trumpeter of light, caller of the new world. This Dome is... unknown to me, but you delve in mysteries many do not understand. Let me grant you the means to dive deep, deeper, to break this Dome, so that we all may breathe the clean air outside of it and grow, grow, grow."

In the center of the clearing, Manchineel spreads her hands, her tiny, slim five-foot frame at once astonishingly frail and looming with leashed power. The sun appears behind the clouds, outlining her form in light. The picture is as perfect as it could manage to be. "My first Menagerie will be given glory and rest. They will choose their forms and live in them, at peace, honored by Nature and protected for all of their natural lives. But you... with you, we will perfect it. Everything, even nature, needs perfection. With you, it can be done." Manchineel stands still, a small smile on her face, the picture of serenity, sincerity, and natural conviction. The spider-mantis creature shudders behind her. The clover-leafed turtle chews its leaves.

Spoiler: Perception DC 29 (Scent counts as well... if it's available)

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And in the trees behind the clearing, one--and only one--familiar figure lurks, and hums, and smells faintly of honey...

Spoiler: OOC

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Map is here. Place yourselves wherever you like.

Manchineel has not made any move to attack--not even with pheromones, as far as you can tell! That being said, she knew you were coming, and she hasn't let down her defenses. You can attempt to bluff her to get a surprise attack, you can try seeing how she reacts to what you know about her... or you can do something I haven't considered. The ball's in your court!

[Ridai]

Nerves are acting up much more once they are in the completely disfigured forest. There has been practice with the sense of the most dangerous fight coming interfering with his concentration. But it's just going to be bad anyway. "Natural" environment like a liminal space image gallery. One of the big bads at the center. The spider-mantis and its tortured existence doesn't help either. Or that everything around them is silent.

Nope shakes his head, looking at the ground that may as well be a carpet as Manchineel announces her plan to make him the new Uriel. Once the dryad is done, he says "Lucia, you think you can make me "know myself" and make others "know me" with a new body. You don't know what you're talking about. If you did, I wouldn't ever have gotten here."

"I, too, would like the world to make sense. But it doesn't. And nature doesn't care, it just is, all the competition, suffering, and killing its fauna inflicting on itself included. The universe doesn't give a **** about us and what we think. Millions of little rules under the hood making everything in nature work and adapt, and we barely know a tiny fraction of 'em. And there's something like that for humanity as well. I saw it once. And it refuses to make any goddamn sense or care. Or follow any little rules we try to make up. The moment you make me Uriel, you will mess with forces you don't know anything about and will not understand. And if you are lucky, they will just wipe you from existence. If not, you might end up like that one." Nope points to the spider-mantis enduring its agony-filled last few hours of existence.

"And you might take whatever is around you with you. I don't like this country very much. I think it is ******* insane and hostile, the way it was made what it is today. Plenty of bad people too. It's well on the way of ruining itself. But I don't wish bad things on others. It's not ideal, but I am fearful for a reason. The alternative is much worse. You remember when insects stopped being a thing in the Dome. That was an accident. Same time, you are well on the way of wiping people out, unintentionally or not, in the name of whatever the hell this is." He gestures to Symmetry Grid Forest. "Can't let that happen. Can't let you make me Uriel either. 'Cause that might be even worse. Don't like doing any of this, don't want to be here and fight, but it is what it is." Hands go back into his hoodie pockets. He thought about appealing to Lucia's humanity, maybe finding some common ground in how insane the world seems. But he honestly just doesn't know how. She already did so many things that are so far beyond any sort of moral compass he can comprehend. So he at least wants her to understand where he is coming from. This isn't personal vendetta or some pre-destined crap. Just Manchineel's pressure creating counter-pressure.

At least the talking helps Nope acclimate to his nerves a little bit. He sure doesn't sound like the most confident human on Earth.

Spoiler: OOC

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Perception DC 29 (1d20+10)[27]

[Quellian-dyrae]

As they entered the grove, for the first time since that terrible day almost three months ago, Lily beheld the specter of Manchineel.

And froze.

She didn't go still, in the way she sometimes did. Every so often, when something sufficiently caught her attention, Lily went as still as a wooden mannequin. Nectar flowed through her veins, but not according to a heart's pulse. Oxygen went to provide fuel for her cells, but her chest did not rise and fall with breath. Even the tiny unconscious shifts of position a human might make, for balance or comfort or just from the occasional twitch of muscles she didn't really...do. It rarely lasted long enough to be a noticeable factor, but in those moments, she didn't even blink.

Lily did not go that still, when she laid eyes on Manchineel.

Because though her feet felt rooted to the ground, her entire body shook like a leaf. The tip of the spear she held wavered wildly. The smell of honey filled the air around her at an intensity just barely short of cloying.

It was funny. They had hunted down every member of her Menagerie. She had been obsessing over this moment, this coming battle, for a week straight - an entirely sleepless week at that. Preparing for it, planning for it, assembling whatever weapons she could all with the single and specific intent of defeating Manchineel once and for all.

So how in the world had she somehow managed to overlook the fact that that meant actually facing flipping MANCHINEEL!?

Well, no. That wasn't entirely fair, no matter how accurate it may have seemed to her in the moment. It wasn't like she hadn't known that was exactly what they were doing, hadn't worried and fretted over it. It was...it was just the flip side of what she had realized at the coffee shop. This entire time, she had been subconsciously assuming that dying here was more-or-less a foregone conclusion. It would not be correct to say she had accepted that. Mostly she hadn't noticed or consciously thought about it at all. But that's where all her fear of Manchineel had really been going.

And now? Now that she had realized what she was doing, consciously noticed it, and decisively rejected it?

It turned out she was just as terrified as Manchineel as she had been when she had first attacked her lab.

Manchineel spoke, and Lily, still shaking, boggled. She was...well, no, she wasn't apologizing. But she said she had been arrogant, short-sighted. Lily's mind literally went blank there. She did not know how to respond to that. Foolish!? Manchineel had, if not ruined her life, come terrifyingly near to it. Had very probably ruined her coworkers' lives. And had certainly changed her life indelibly, and not necessarily for the better, even if she were generous enough to give her credit for the powers. Her tension with her family, her all-but-broken relationship with her sister, was more than proof enough of that.

And it had been...what, a mistake? An oopsie-daisy?

Lily Woods was far from perfect, and in particular was far from perfectly forgiving. Her relationship with Hannah would have been in a much better place if she had been. But you know, sure. She could recognize when bias was influencing her thoughts. It was not actually rational that she should find this claim more offensive than she felt she would have found M. Bison's "For me it was Tuesday" line in the same circumstance. Maybe, maybe, she could have found it within herself to offer forgiveness, had Manchineel followed up on that with a heartfelt apology. Maybe she could have empathized with a person new to their powers, making a terrible mistake with abilities they did not truly understand how to use, or control.

Manchineel did not ask for her forgiveness.

Manchineel asked...for a DO-OVER!

The shaking didn't stop. But the smell of honey started to burn away under the scent of freshly-baked bread.

"Perfect us!?" Lily spat, with enough venom behind it that it should have taken up 20 PP out of her dynamic array. "You mean turn us into more of your MONSTERS!?" The dam broke. Months of fear, and pain, and hate, and blinding rage started spewing out from Lily's mouth of a vindictive torrent. "You perfect nothing! Look at this place! Picturesque identical trees!? They'll all get wiped out at once if even one of them gets a disease! Roots forming a pathway? Brilliant, you made them bigger so they need more water to survive, and then made them less efficient at collecting it! Look at those poor creatures! They'll die by sunset because you took a pair of insects, smooshed them together, bulked them up to like a thousand times their previous size, and didn't take the time to cheat away the mess it made of their biology or probably even the damage done by the freaking square-cube law! Look at what you did to Zephyr Magro! He couldn't even speak when you were through with him! Look at what you did to Cosme Muto! Overwrote a brilliant mind with a literal bird-brain, and then cursed her to fear the ground as an afterthought!" Tears of faintly golden nectar started falling from Lily's eyes, then. "Look at what you did to Ntombi Peters! A lover of nature just like you profess to be, and you turned her into a fungal horror and bound her in chains of biology!"

And then, with a faint green-gold sparkle as stored solar energy was released from several dozen places on her body, the lovely young woman with flower petals for wings was gone, and in her place stood a monster. It was almost nine feet tall, but didn't really look big, for its body was more narrow in profile than even Lily's small, slim form had been, a more-or-less cylindrical green stamen. It had no legs, just a tangle of roots that undulated like a tentacular nest of earthworms. It had no arms, but two broad leaves extended out from its sides, pliable enough to wrap and grasp, but with edges sharp enough to serve as blades. Thorns jutted out from all over its stamen, shaped like the thorns of a rose but far larger, the biggest nearing a foot in length and sprouting smaller secondary thorns of their own, a toxic green substance dripping from their tips. At the top was a "head" that seemed a bulbous orb of yellow pollen, a rough outline of Lily's face vaguely visible in the motes of it, as if she were pressing it against one of those little bed-of-needle toys, veiled in four large flower petals - pink at their base, gradiating to white at their edges. Hilariously, the little plastic noseplug, not being constructed of vegetable matter and so not within her power to transform, remained pinched incongruously over the roughly nose-shaped protrusion in the pollen. The flower monster bent its pliable stamen so the vague outline of its face could fix Manchineel with a rage-filled glare, and it roared in a voice that was neither masculine nor feminine, but a horrible wavering buzzing, like an entire hive of bees vibrating at precisely the right frequency to produce sounds that could just barely be recognized as human speech.

"LoOk At WhAt YoU dId To Me! YoU cAlL tHiS pErFeCt!?"

The energy maintaining that momentary transmutation expired - for as always, Lily's tactical transmutations, fueled by stored solar energy, were only ever short lived. It was only using her base power, at its base speed of two pounds per second, that she could transform vegetable matter to another form permanently. The next instant, she was back in her normal form, a thin line of nectar running down each cheek. The shaking had stopped.

"Guess what, Manchineel? Humans are part of nature too. We evolved the same way every other plant and animal on this planet did, and after over three and a half billion years of blind trial and error, our brains are the single most wondrous thing to ever come out of the entire process, by orders of magnitude. And sure, we may not be perfect. But I'll take evolution's blind chaos over your oh-so-intelligent design ANY DAY!"

Spoiler

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Hero Point! HERO POINT! AND ANOTHER HERO POINT! Manchineel shares Lily's Weakness to effects that specifically affect plantlife!

Initiative: (1d20+8)[12]!

[Abracadangit]

Kal hears out Manchineel's chilling speech, and the threads making up her costume bristle in discomfort at the mention of being added to the Menagerie.

"Hnn, hnn, hnn, hnn," snickers Ariadne, at the end. "I think to myself, where have I heard something like this before? And of course, the spider reminds me. You are the latest in a long line of Arachnes, fools who have a taste of power or skill, and dream themselves to be equal with the gods."

"But you are more a gardener than a goddess, hm? You do not like it for your oaks and elms to grow beside each other, so you arrange them in tidy little lines. You cannot bend allies to your cause, so you infect them with madness that dissolves who they are. You think you are an aspect of nature? Hnn, hnn, hnn. You are an aspect of trowels and trellises." The crimson thread begins to weave and twist around Ariadne, forming enormous pruning shears, poised to strike.

"Let us not tarry, hm? There is much thread to be spun."

[Dorni]

Helios wore a scowl while the team passed through the perfectly spaced forest. It reminded him of a plantation forest left behind after a logging crew came in. Those trees were planted in unnaturally even rows as well, but the root and branches at least were allowed to grow wild and they provided a shelter for the shrubs and creatures below. This was just eerie, like some artist had heard about a thing called a forest and decided to make one pretty while completely missing its soul.

By the time Manchineel finished her big speech, Helios just felt tired. "Lucia, that's your big pitch? Join me and we'll perfect nature? I'll admit I at least expected a 'join or die'."

He gestured held a hand out toward Lily. "What she said. But... you never had a pet, did you? You don't love an animal because they're perfect. You love them for who they are. All their quirks and habits. You smile when they hide under a pile of blankets when it storms. You grumble about how they never let you sleep in on the weekend. She could be such a brat sometimes. If you 'perfected' all that away you'd be left something no different from a robot."

"You don't need a new menagerie. You're that boss who needs people around them that can tell them 'no' and stop them before their terrible ideas cause more harm."

[Zelphas]

Round 1

An odd, strangled sort of expression appears on Manchineel's face as Nope begins to speak, though she smooths it quickly behind a mask of smooth calm, almost concern. She listens, her body just a little too still, but does not respond to Nope's statements, her pure-green eyes boring into him with something remote behind them. Then Lily speaks, and Manchineel barely shifts to look at her. She nods at seemingly appropriate moments during the rant, even making a sound that could almost be considered a noise of concern when she sees Floral's monstrous form. Lily finishes her speech...

And Manchineel laughs and claps her hands like a little child. "Yes, yes! I knew you were the right choice, when Uriel brought you to my attention. I hear the music, but you... you know how to write it. Once you can hear it, too, how beautiful this world will become! A beautiful garden--for the world is a garden, and what is a garden without its loving gardener?" Manchineel raises one hand as if to brush off Ariadne's comments, her eyes fixed on Floral.

That strangled, strange expression appears on Manchineel's expression again for a moment in response to Helios' words, stronger, and more strongly pushed away. "But that is just what I'm asking, dear Gabriel! I know the goal, but I've stumbled on the path, made errors and mistakes. Who better to tell me, to guide me and be guided by me, than you? All of you? But you will not listen." Abruptly, anger clouds Manchineel's dryadic visage. "I gave you the chance of aiding me willingly, but you have elected the way of pain. So be it."

With a flash of green, Manchineel sinks into the geometric pattern of roots all around her. A few seconds later, she steps out of the tree next to Nope, reaching up with a hand. At its touch, Nope would feel pain--pain and weakness, as the toxin leached his strength from his limbs. Moments later, the Spider-Mantis has lurched across the field, one long, bladed arm flinging drops of poison as it slashes down. From behind in the similar grove, a low buzzing heralds the approach of one more enemy, this one hauntingly familiar. A Vesper floats from behind a tree, flying on its silent wings directly up to Floral and reaching out one not-hand, it's motions disturbingly similar to Manchineel's.

On the other side of the clearing, a large tortoise covered in clover tries to see if it can find anything but dead leaves to eat on the ground.

Spoiler: Floral

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If the Vesper hits you, you take a -5 to your first (and only first, if Progressive matters) Resistance check vs. the Affliction. Take a Hero Point now because I refuse to let them die.

Spoiler: OOC

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Map.

Manchineel

Move Action: Teleport to AB41.

Standard Action: Use Toxic Touch on Nope. (1d20+14)[22] On a hit, Resistance DC 33/28 vs. Secondary Effect Damage Linked Progressive Weaken Resistance. Hit

Spider-Mantis

Move Action: Shift to AA44. (Ariadne, if you'd like to start elsewhere, move the Spider-Mantis to directly above you when you move.)

Free Action: Reconfigure Abomination Weapon Array.

Standard Action: Use Overpotent Delayed Paralyzer Slash on Ariadne. (1d20+12)[25] On a hit, Resistance DC 29/24 vs. Secondary Effect Damage Linked Progressive Dazed & Impaired/Stunned & Disabled. Hit

Last Vesper (I promise, unless Manchineel wins)

Move Action: Fly to Y40.

Standard Action: Use Touching Sting on Floral. (1d20+10)[28] On a hit, Resistance DC 29/24 vs. Penetrating Damage Linked Progressive Impaired/Stunned/Paralyzed Affliction. Hit, full Penetrating; DCs are 34/24.

Raskovnik

Actions: Try to find something tasty to eat. (1d20)[12] Just the leaves...

All PCs are up. This is the last battle of the arc: Hero Points are use 'em or lose 'em!

[Quellian-dyrae]

If you asked Lily which she were more afraid of, Manchineel or the Vespers...well, she'd probably be too proud to give you a straight answer and launch into an elaborate discussion of various capabilities along with their both general and personal threat levels in an effort to bury you in details and numbers and comparisons in the desperate hope that you would give up and go away.

But not counting that, she'd say Manchineel without hesitation. It was simply and intuitively obvious. Manchineel was vastly more powerful than Vespers, and also could create Vespers! It really wasn't a question, from any sort of rational threat-assessment standpoint.

It wasn't that Lily didn't know, didn't understand, that fear wasn't actually a matter of rational threat assessment. She just wouldn't have seen how else to answer to question. She was pretty freaking terrified of both of them. She could reflect back on her past encounters with them and try to evaluate which had felt more frightening, but both situations had resolved to a sufficiently intense fear that she couldn't really accurately judge relative degree. She couldn't quite say with confidence that they had been equally scary, but she was fairly sure the felt fear amount of fear would not have appeared meaningfully different if graphed on a log scale. It definitely wasn't statistically significant. Failing that, the only way she could think of to answer the question was by reframing it as which she believed presented the greatest total threat to her. It was a proxy for the true answer, but she would have figured, a fairly reliable one. And on that assessment, it was Manchineel hands down. Absent some manner of empirical evidence of her relative emotional response, it was the best answer she could give.

So, good news! Now she had that! Because when the Vesper popped out and started reaching for her, and Manchineel popped up and started reaching for Nope, she didn't just try to dodge, she literally hurled herself away from the Vesper and straight into Manchineel's reaching grasp! Empirical evidence obtained! Update made! She is officially more afraid of Vespers than Manchineel! Yay science!

The last time Lily Woods had felt the touch of Manchineel's hand, she had experienced the sudden bending, twisting, writhing agony of being transformed against her will into a hideous flower-monster, her body, her cells, her very DNA altered on a fundamental level. She had cried, and she had screamed, and she had begged, and she had changed. Bees may have come closer to killing her, but that was and remained the most viscerally awful experience of her life.

This time...she came out of it with her arm feeling just slightly damp. Poison didn't...it didn't work great on a person whose body was filled with healing nectar rather than blood.

In Lily's head, Lucia Urquhart and Manchineel were two different people. She had never really been able to integrate them into a single mental model. Lucia was...the raw materials that had been reconfigured to become Manchineel, to her. While she could switch back and forth between say Uriel and Ntombi, she would not, by natural inclination, call Manchineel anything other than Manchineel.

...But that was just her baseline impulse, not some hard mental block. She didn't go without noting Manchineel's reactions to Lucia's name being spoken. If there was any chance that calling Manchineel Lucia could distract her even slightly, that was more than enough reason to do it to overcome a slight cognitive preference. "Sorry, Lucia. But it turns out I'm not just another pretty flower for your garden."

And she whirled her spear in hand, gripped it firmly, and thrust it- straight into the ground, impaling a single yellow leaf amidst that fractal carpet.

Lily's power rushed out of her, passing through that leaf and into the others it was in contact with, and from them to the ones they touched, and on and on. Not in a Raphaelan blaze of brilliant green-white light. Not even in a sparkling shimmer of stored sunlight. It didn't come with the concussive blast of a bomb, or a sudden shockwave, or even a light breeze. It wasn't a flood, or a wave. It was barely a ripple, a gentle surge of energy noticeable more for its effects than for itself. It wasn't subtle on the level of Nope's power. The sky did not sneeze, trees did not rotate 360 degrees, and the fundamental concept of North did not dance a quick jig. For the power Lily unleashed was not the power to heal grievous wounds, or scour a foe with searing acid, or cripple them with poison. She wasn't even smelling good especially hard.

In the face of Manchineel, her greatest personal enemy, one of the most powerful villains in the Dome - and perhaps in the world, as rare and uncertain as superpowers were, or at least had been, until the Watcher had arrived in their time - Lily opened up combat with her single weakest power.

The power to transform vegetable matter into other vegetable matter, precisely down to the cellular level, at the rate of two pounds per second.

Over the course of the next six seconds, that power would ripple gently out among the mass of leaves making up Manchineel's fractal carpet. Lily's base power was incredibly weak, but that didn't necessarily mean that it was small. Its limit was mass, not volume. Twelve pounds wasn't a lot in most contexts...but it could be a lot of leaves.

She didn't change them all in one space, surrounding herself with a thousand leaves in garish colors, creating a single blighted mark on Manchineel's working. It was more subtle than that. In any other forest in autumn, you never would have noticed a difference, unless maybe you had been paying close attention when a particular leaf changed.

But here, it would be all too obvious when Manchineel's perfect pattern...broke.

She didn't change one leaf in ten, even one in a hundred. One in several hundred, maybe. She changed their hues, mostly just to the other colors making up the pattern, but not in the pattern, placed wrongly. A thousand individual pixels out of place, spread out randomly - not in a pattern of their own - making the entire picture look ever so subtly but clearly noticeably wrong.

That wasn't all she did. She threw in a few random green leaves out of nowhere. Many of the leaves she changed were darker or lighter than the base colors of the pattern. Many of them became different types of leaves, leaves that didn't match the location, that made no sense to be here. Some ceased to be leaves at all, becoming acorns, or twigs...or flowers, creating tiny gaps in the carpet, like dead pixels on a computer screen. She removed too much yellow and created too much red, offsetting the color balance ever so slightly.

"I'm a weed!" she told her, and fired a vine - really, an elongating weed - tipped with poisonous thorns first at Manchineel, before it curved around to go slashing past the Vesper, and finished off thrusting a thorny tip at the spider-mantis.

Spoiler

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Free: Reconfigure Flower Power (+10). 10 points to Transmute Plants(!), 5 points to Overpowering Scent, 5 points to Overwhelming Scent, 10 points to Poisonous Nectar, 10 points to Drugged Nectar, 10 points to Floral Blood, 10 points to Floral Vines (Affliction+Weaken). Descriptor set to [Physiological] [Poison]. Her Blight power is also active, adding its Penetrating extras to the Affliction and Weaken against plants only.

Free: Set Favored Environment bonus to Attack.

Move: Charge Floral Vines.

Standard: Transform about a thousand leaves in a way that subtly but obviously ruins Manchineel's pattern while Linking an attack on Manchineel, The Last Vesper, and Spider-Mantis (oh I see what you did there XD) with Poisonous Nectar. On a hit, Resistance DC 20 vs. [Physiological] [Poison] Impaired+Vulnerable/Disabled+Defenseless Affliction Linked Weaken Effect and Resistance. The Blight makes this especially effective against Plant targets, adding the Penetrating extra.

Manchineel: (1d20+12)[26].
The Last Vesper: (1d20+12)[25].
Spider-Mantis: (1d20+12)[30].

Current Status: Normal, SE (Damage DC 33@+5), Floral Blood (+5 Res/-5 Def).

[Ridai]

Nope balls his fists and grits his teeth as Manchineel disappears and the fight begins, pressing breaths through his teeth at an increasing rate. Mental state transitioning from a level surface disturbed by ripples to the adrenaline-fueled spiky ball of tension, where control takes a hit, but Removals get pushed out faster (whether Nope likes it or not).

He doesn't even register Manchineel appearing beside him until it is too late, or rather until Floral intercepts the attack, seemingly just straight up ignoring it. The moment kicks Nope into action, simply throwing himself in the way of the Vesper, very much feeling the poison, very much removing as much of it as he can before it can paralyze his heart and lungs. Instead, he is just left with a great deal of pain.

A grunt presses out of Nope. Focus. Focus. Vesper, Spider-Mantis, Manchineel. Aw heck. No time to think about how more powerful beings seem to be able to resist the Removals more easily (...sometimes). Just... just try to incapacitate what he can.

Spoiler: Actions

Show

Free We are once again on Remove Second Guessing and Remove Hit Points, Mass.

Move Dazed.

Standard Attack The Last Vesper, the Spider-Mantis, and Manchineel. DC 27 Damage (Shapeable Area 2 [Limited [6"x6"x240' bendable line]], Penetrating, Improved Critical 4, Multiattack, Ranged). Power Attacking -2/+2, All-out Attack -2/+2. Penetrating to punch through resistances. Multiattack set to single-target.
Attack vs The Last Vesper (1d20+10)[18]
Attack vs Spider-Mantis (1d20+10)[13] Rerolled to 22
Attack vs Manchineel (1d20+10)[27] Crit, but not getting my hopes up

[Abracadangit]

The Spider-Mantis' claw rakes out towards Ariadne, and for a moment, looks as though it connected. But Ariadne's double explodes in a cyclone of red thread, and she weaves herself back into the world a short distance away.

"Hnn, hnn, hnn, stitching together beetles and bugs. Reminds me of minotaurs. Why are bloated tyrants always guarded by monsters made of different beasts put together, like wooden dolls?"

The needle in her hand flickers coldly in the sunlight, as a salvo of threads coils around her like springs.

"It matters not. For the tyrants, it always ends the same."

Spoiler: OOC

Show

Move: Moving to AA49.
Standard: Dropping a Thread Lash Cloud on AA42. I think that hits everyone, but please correct me if I'm wrong. Homing, Multiattack, Secondary Effect, Penetrating to get through resistances.
Against Spider-Mantis: (1d20+10)[30]
Against Manchineel: (1d20+10)[27]
Against The Last Vesper: (1d20+10)[25]

[Dorni]

Helios barely reacted at the sight of the Vesper and the tortoise-thing coming into view, merely making a mental note. Then taking a mental note that he'd only taken a mental note. He was no warrior. Or, rather, he didn't think of himself as one prior to this vacation. But that was weeks ago and now in the face of what should have been his most terrifying enemy yet he found himself calm.

Or maybe the unreality hadn't set in yet. Blame the magic. Either way, worry for later.

"I guess there was a Join-Or-Die here after all. This is exactly the problem here. You make an offer. We say no. You immediately try to force us to serve you anyway. That's rather the opposite of showing that you're willing to listen to others. Consider that test a failure."

He'd come prepared with spells worked out just for Manchineel, but put that aside and seized on the opening Floral had created, weaving an old favorite. Helios knew he was taking a risk weakening his wards to pour more power into the spell, but it struck him as worth it to take down out one of their enemies early. And the spider-mantis deserved mercy rather than being slowly crushed by its own mass. He snapped his fingers and the spider-mantis erupted in flames.

Spoiler: OOC

Show

Free: Set Spells to Penetrating Secondary Effect Damage Linked Penetrating Weaken [Resistance]

Move:
Standard: Cast Combust on Spider Mantis. AoA/PA 5. (1d20+10)[13]. On hit, DC 30+/25+ vs SE Damage and Weaken [Resistance]

Fine, AoA 5. All characters begin combat with a Triggered Restorative SE 6 Healing effect.

[Zelphas]

Round 2

"You--" Manchineel seems to freeze, staring at a leaf out of place in the ground directly in front of her. Floral's weed disappears into her arrow-leaf hair, and then out the other side, somehow without touching Manchineel. All around her, Nope twists the world, Ariadne sends out stinging threads, and Helios brings forth his fire. The Last Vesper catches Floral's poisonous weed with one hand, holding it tight for a split second before letting it tear out and slam into the Spider-Mantis. The extra force cracks some of the Spider-Mantis' glistening green chitin, causing the misbetgotten creature to keen weirdly in pain. The world shudders comfortably, and the crack is twice as wide as it was, the Spider-Mantis seeming almost more confused than pained by the change. Threads meet bees and warp into a hexagon around the Last Vesper, not touching its inhuman surface, but the Spider-Mantis is not so lucky; it lets out another low, keening cry as the threads find its new weakness and tear the chitin more, spreading the cracks. Fire meets moss in a hiss of steam, and then the Spider-Mantis reappears, slightly blackened, wounded, twitching--and still alive.

Nothing touches Manchineel. Nothing breaks her concentration on the single leaf. Reaching down with one small, delicate hand, the so-called spirit of the forest touches the leaf with a single finger. The air shivers unhealthily, and the pattern is restored. "I accept the title of gardener with pride, my dear weed," Manchineel says, rising back to her feet and looking directly at Floral. "What is a gardener but a perfecter of nature's beauty? Say what you will about weeds at large, but a gardener verses a four weeds is not even a tale worth telling."

The Spider-Mantis shudders, curling inwards on itself. The pale green chitin darkens, moving from grass, to bottle, to deep forest, spreading out from the... is it shrinking?... crack until the entire Mantis is this darkened color. Straightening, the Mantis bares mismatched fangs, then reaches up to wipe both of its long, sharp blade-arms across them, leaving trails of budding poison. It flicks its blades once, twice, sending arcs of bubbling poison towards Helios nearby.

The Last Vesper, for its part, simply spreads its too-long arms, and bees flood from every gap in its hive-body to sting and bite at the person before it.

In the back of the clearing, the great tortoise lifts up its head, observing the battle with uninterested eyes before going back to its forage.

And Ariadne feels the earlier blow from the Spider-Mantis suddenly slam into her anew, and Floral feels the damp poison of Manchineel on her arm begin to burn...

Spoiler: OOC

Show

Map.

Manchineel

Move Action: Seethe.

Standard Action: Use Perfect Nature on the forest floor; the pattern is restored.

End of Turn: SE activates. Floral, Resistance DC 33 vs. Damage.

Spider-Mantis

Move Action: Dazed.

Free Action: Reconfigure Abomination Weapon Array

Standard Action: Use Destabilizer Slice on Helios. (1d20+13)[29] On a hit, Resistance DC 21 vs. Weaken Attack Bonus. Hit

End of Turn 1: save vs. Impaired & Vulnerable (DC 22): (1d20+6)[25] Recovers...

End of Turn 2: Regenerate 1 Bruise, heal 1 Resistance and 1 Effect.

End of Turn 3: SE activates. Ariadne, Resistance DC 29 vs. Damage.

Last Vesper

Move Action: None.

Standard Action: Use Swarm on Nope. (1d20+12)[21] On a hit, Resistance DC 27+/22 vs. Multiattack Damage Linked Progressive Impaired/Stunned. Hit, no Multiattack.

Raskovnik

Maybe this time?: (1d20)[19] Is that--nope, more leaves.

All PCs are up.

[Quellian-dyrae]

"For a normal gardener, maybe. But you seem to kinda suck at the job, Lucia." Lily said, pointing behind Manchineel at a patch of leaves that, with another pulse of Lily's power, turned dry, brown, and withered. Oh, sure, it wasn't anywhere near the scale of disruption to the pattern that her previous attempt had been. But when you were dealing with somebody who was sufficiently obsessive, sometimes the size of the disruption wasn't everything. "You missed a spot."

While learning how many licks it took to get to the Temper-roll center of an Obsession-pop was a noble scientific experiment, the Spider-Mantis seemed to be shrugging off a lot of the damage it had received. The traces of Blight she had added to her poisoned weed had seemed effective against it.

Time to see how it did against the real thing. Lily pointed her spear like...well, I'd say like a rifle, but we've seen now how she handles a rifle and this was much better than that, growing a thorn from its tip, filling it with Blighted venom, and firing it at the Spider-Mantis.

Manchineel had avoided all of their attacks almost effortlessly. Defeating her through force of arms would require their full concentration; that meant taking out the lesser foes first. But it didn't mean they could just leave Manchineel completely unengaged. So even as Lily brought her powers and her invention to bear against the Spider-Mantis, she continued striking not at Manchineel's body, but at every psychological weakness she knew about, or could imagine her having.

"There is something I've been wondering, though. When we talked to Abel, he called Michael your second child, and the rest of the Menagerie his brethren. When we talked to Uriel, she also said you referred to them as your children, and that you loved them."

"But Helios is right, it's not like you made them an offer and they accepted it. And they certainly didn't serve you out of love. Uriel was terrified of you. Gabriel despises you. Michael and Raphael were just animals following their instincts, and by the time you were through with him Abel wasn't much more than that - although to be fair, that one particular case wasn't actually your fault."

"You sing, and they dance, is how Abel and Uriel both described it. That's why they served you. And I could go into a whole rant about how that's not love, but you know, maybe in your twisted up head it makes sense. Maybe you think that singing to your children is just what a mother is supposed to do. I could at least understand that, all things considered."

"But the moment we arrived, you launched right into offering to make us your new Menagerie. We took Michael down two days ago, and he went down so easy it almost makes me wonder if you sent him to get himself captured just to open his slot. Heck, Gabriel's still technically active, and here you go offering Helios her job."

"So here's my question: what kind of mother is so eager to replace her own children?"

She let that hang for a beat or two, and then added, her voice softer, more gentle, sounding almost sympathetic. There wasn't really any particular reason to believe this line of attack would amount to anything. Nothing they had learned about Manchineel suggested it should have all that much of an effect. "Lucia Urquhart had a mother too, you know. You turned her friend's daughter into Gabriel."

But when it came to psychological attacks, Lily Woods, of all people, knew there was no harder punch to throw than one that hit you in the family.
And she threw that punch as ruthlessly as she would swing her Blighted spear. She would leave no weapon lying idle that might give her any even incrementally better chance at defeating her nemesis.

"Do you think she's replaced you yet?"

Spoiler

Show

Non-Action: Blight remains active.

Free: Reconfigure Flower Power (+10). 10 points to Transmute Plants, 10 points to Floral Blood, 10 points to Floral Thorn, 10 points to Miasmic Scent, 10 points to Drugged Nectar, 10 points to Lingering Scents.

Free: Set Favored Environment to Attack.

Move: Long-shot attempt to Feint Spider-Mantis (+2 for Favored Foe) at (1d20+7)[16].

Standard: Use Transmute Plants to transmute a bit of Manchineel's pattern to dry dead leaves, and Link an attack on Spider-Mantis with Blight, All Out Attacking for 5, Power Attacking for 2, at (1d20+15)[20]. On a hit, Resistance DC 22+Penetrating/22+Penetrating vs. [Physiological] [Poison] Limited to Plants Cumulative Secondary Effect Impaired+Vulnerable/Disabled+Defenseless Affliction and [Physiological] [Poison] Limited to Plants Weaken Effect and Resistance. On a miss, Homing 1. Pretty sure that just misses unless the Feint succeeds.

Free: Talk.

Current Status: Normal, AoA -5, Floral Blood (-5 Def/+5 Res).

[Abracadangit]

"Hrrrm," Ariadne hrrms, upon realizing that some of her foes have been bred specifically to be resistant to magic. In that case, she had other patterns to weave.

Buoyed on wings of thread, she zooms over to the center of her teammates' formation, just as quilted shields spin into existence around her allies and herself.

Spoiler: OOC

Show

Move: Move to Z44.
Standard: Silken Shields Cloud on Z43, should get everyone inside.

[Ridai]

Manchineel turns out to be as OCD as rumored, which is good.

The Last Vesper, meanwhile, engulfs Nope in bees. As their kind is wont to do. Nope would sigh, but he doesn't want bees down his throat again. He found way too many bees in his clothes after the last fight against Vespers. And some stuck in burned skin sticking to clothes. So being able to Remove much of what the bees are trying to do is okay. But he is still covered in bees.

So, while the member of the League is still busy with getting the floor just right and the bees are currently not invading his orifices, Nope tries to focus on the Spider-Mantis, to maybe also put it out of its misery.

Spoiler: Actions

Show

Free Switching to Remove Hit Points

Standard Attack Spider-Mantis. DC 25/20/20 Damage (Ranged, Improved Crit 4), Linked Weaken Resistance, Linked Affliction (Impaired+Vulnerable/Disabled+Defenseless/Incapacitated; Extra Condition)
Attack (1d20+10)[18]

[Dorni]

Helios frowned. His spell had set the spider-mantis chimera on fire, so that wasn't nothing, but he'd felt a... resistance to his spell. Manchineel had figured out how to imbue the spider-mantis with magic resistance. Great. Yet the chimera hadn't fully recovered from Lily's spear and the flames were still burning. Now wasn't the time to let up.

So instead of conjuring fire, he wove another spell. This time the spider-mantis was engulfed by a purple, acrid-smelling miasma. Leaves and vines alike withered and died where the toxic herbicidal mist touched them.

Spoiler: OOC

Show

Free: activate Ritual: Bio (Concentration Damage (Limited to Plants) Linked Concentration Weaken [Resistance] (Limited to Plants) [Poison])
Free: Set Spells to Damage gains Penetrating, Perception. Weaken gains Penetrating.

Standard: Cast Bio on Spider Mantis. (1d20+7)[12]. On hit, DC 25+/20+ vs Penetrating Damage / Penetrating Weaken [Resistance]

End of turn: Recover 1 attack bonus
-2 Attack, SE Healing 6, Deflected

[Zelphas]

Round 3

The Last Vesper, seemingly forgotten in the melee, covers itself in a thick carpet of bees, while more bees flash out to surround the Spider-Mantis in a hexagon shape of protection. It buzzes quietly, waiting.

Meanwhile, the Spider-Mantis hardly seems to notice Floral's thorn piercing its armor, the world warping inside out and sideways near it, or the fog of poison that wilts some of its moss. A secondary flare of Fire bursts around it, increasing the burn on its moss, but already new moss is growing, spreading, dying, as its accelerated lifespan cures its wounds and pushes it further towards its final end. Seeing one of its foes obligingly appear in front of it (just before vanishing behind a shield of cloth), the creature lifts its scythe-arms and slashes again, poison foaming from all along the blade.

The giant clover-turtle wanders a little closer to the clearing, still browsing through the leaves.

Finally, Manchineel goes through a whole host of emotions in a matter of moments. Rage, as a new patch of leaves ruin the freshly-remade pattern, transforming into vindictive anger as she looks back at Floral. Then confusion blossoms, followed by chagrin, and finally haughty pride. "They would not be 'replaced'; I would give them peace, rest, their own places to--"

Then Floral said a name. First and last. And for a moment, Lucia Urquhart stared out of pure-green eyes, horrified, terrified beyond belief, perhaps beyond sanity.

"No. No!" Manchineel put her hands to either side of her head, crouching down as though expecting a blow. A strange medley of scents--honey-dipped mint, cinnamon and maple syrup--permeates the symmetrical grove, sweet smells grown harsh by their strength. "I'm not--she didn't--Lucia died. She died--at Camp, when everything--no! Stop. STOP!" All the other scents are overwhelmed seconds later by an indescribable scent, something that attempts to overpower the mind as well as the senses: the desperate, primal urge to freeze in place.

Mere seconds later, the final Vesper vanishes with a crash as Gabriel lands directly on top of it, oversized talons extended. Bees crawl up and over her legs, stinging and stinging; she staggers under their assault, but barely keeps herself upright, and the screech that splits the air is filled with pure, simple rage.

Spoiler: OOC

Show

Map.

The Last Vesper

Move Action: Nope--er, not moving.

Standard Action: Use Guard on the Spider-Mantis. The Spider-Mantis is Deflected at 1d20+11 (minimum 21).

Spider-Mantis

Move Action: Dazed.

Free Action: Reconfigure Abomination Weapon Array.

Standard Action: Use Delayed Overpotent Paralyzer Scythe on Ariadne, All-Out Attacking for 5. The wall is in the way.

Accuracy vs. the wall: (1d20+18)[34] vs. Deflect: (1d20+10)[21] On a hit, wall Resistance vs. Damage DC 27: (1d20+10)[25] Hit, but only Bruised!

If that at least Breaches the wall, Accuracy vs. Ariadne: (1d20+18)[37] vs. Deflect: (1d20+10)[12] On a hit, Resistance DC 27/22 vs. Secondary Effect Damage Linked Progressive Dazed & Impaired/Stunned & Dsiabled.

End of Turn: 1 Bruise Healed (Temporary), Heal back 1 Resistance and 1 Effect.

Raskovnik

Move Action: Shift to W7.

Standard Action: Anything good here? (1d20)[13] This is the problem with making a pattern of only leaves.

Manchineel

Move Action: Flashback.

Standard Action: Use Pheromone Overload on everyone within Perception Range (Smell), which is everyone but the Raskovnik.

vs. Spider-Mantis: (1d20+6)[8] vs. 26; on a failure, Resistance (DC 26): (1d20+14)[16] Compelled to Stop
vs. The Last Vesper: (1d20+14)[33] vs. 26; Onb a failure Resistance (DC 26): (1d20+14)[26] Fully Dodged. A True Champion, right until...

Everyone else, Defense roll (DC 26) to negate, and then Resistance DC 26 vs. Cumulative Entranced/Compelled/Controlled. Right now, the only order given through the Compel/Control is "Stop".

Floral: You are Olfactorily Unaware, which makes you immune to this attack. However, since you are directly in front of Manchineel and have been made to be susceptible to these pheromones specifically, you may choose to say that some of the pheromones get through to you. If so, take a Hero Point for your Plant-Based Biology Complication and roll the Resistance check without any Weakness or Resistance modifiers.

Gabriel

Move Action: Arrive dramatically at Y40.

Standard Action: Use Thwack to completely splatter the Last Vesper. Guard activates, and Gabriel takes 1 Bruise and is Staggered from the Vesper's Reaction Damage. All rolls were rolled in the OOC.

All PCs are up!

[Quellian-dyrae]

Lily kept her mouth closed as Manchineel's pheromones washed over the area, ensuring there was no path for them to get up into her nasal passages through her throat. With her nose plugged, she didn't smell a thing.

Gabriel's arrival might have drawn a smile and a wave, in most other circumstances. Or maybe a cheer and a hug, given she freaking swatted the Vesper down like a fly! But here, now, in this moment, she drew little more than a glance, because Lily didn't have the emotional bandwidth for joy, or hope.

The smell of fresh baked bread warred with the remnants of Manchineel's pheromones, as Lily's vision practically went red from rage.

"Stop?" she demanded once the wave of pheromones was passed. "Stop!? I begged you to stop, when you were transforming me into a monster! I pleaded with you to stop, and you didn't even slow down! Didn't so much as hesitate! No! I am not your minion! I am not a part of your Menagerie! You don't get to command me! I don't care what traps you laid in my biology! I don't care what pheromones you throw around! You get stymied by a two-dollar piece of plastic!"

"Lucia Urquhart isn't dead," Lily said, not actually believing a word of it and not caring in the slightest, if it gave her even the tiniest advantage against Manchineel. She didn't have to believe a conclusion to present a convincing argument in its favor. "Lucia Urquhart is the part of you that left Raphael's base nature in-tact, rather than twisting her entirely into something she was not. Lucia Urquhart is the part of you who apologized to Abel when you were unable to repair the damage done by his brother. Lucia Urquhart is the part of you who sought someone who wanted to find a weakness in the dome to become your Gabriel. Lucia Urquhart is the part of you who realized you needed a Uriel to explain to you all the things you were doing wrong, all the ways you were hurting everybody around you. Lucia Urquhart is the part of you who chose an animal instead of a person, to become your hunter of hunters Michael."

"It's called humanity! Learn to love it!" Lily screamed, and rammed her spear straight at Manchineel's stomach, Blight already shooting from its tip even as she struck.

Spoiler

Show

Alright. Turtle's hungry, Mantis is Stopped, Vesper is splattered. Time to take a swing and see what I can get for a double-Complication trigger.

Free: Maintain Blight.

Free: Reconfigure Flower Power (+10). 10 points to Floral Blood, 10 points to Concentrated Poison, 10 points to Concentrated Scents, 10 points to Lingering Scents, 10 points to Lingering Poison, 10 points to Acidic Nectar. Descriptors set to [Physiological] [Poison].

Move: Very long-shot, probably-mostly-Complication-fishing attempt to Feint Manchineel at (1d20+5)[23]. Huh, that might actually have a ghost of a chance of success if she doesn't have Uncanny Dodge.

Standard: Attack Manchineel with Blight, All Out Attacking for 5, at (1d20+10)[22], with +5 for purposes of the Damage due to different attack tradeoffs. On a hit, Resistance DC 25 vs. [Physiological] [Poison] Damage, and regardless of hit or miss DC 25+Penetrating-Perception vs. [Physiological] [Poison] Secondary Effect Limited to Plants Impaired+Vulnerable Affliction and [Physiological] [Poison] Secondary Effect Limited to Plants Limited to One Degree Weaken Effect and Resistance. So 27 to hit for purposes of the Damage, 22 for the Affliction/Weaken but those are Perception. Note also that the Damage isn't Limited to Plants so that Weakness won't apply, though her Poison Person Complication still might.

If she is not affected by the Affliction, either due to making her Resistance check or an Interpose:

Extra Effort - Additional Standard Action: DO IT AGAIN! at (1d20+10)[21]. Likewise this is 26 to hit for the Damage, 21 for the others, IF it happens.

End of Turn: Secondary Effect triggers. Spider-Mantis gets Resistance DC 22 vs. [Physiological] [Poison] Limited to Plants Cumulative Impaired+Vulnerable/Disabled+Defenseless Affliction and [Physiological] [Poison] Limited to Plants Weaken Effect and Resistance.

Current Status: Normal, possibly Fatigued as of next turn, AoA -5, Floral Blood (-5 Def/+5 Res).

[Ridai]

Nope's indistinct face twists as he is hit with the pheromones, and them immediately trying to worm into his mind. The biological sledgehammer version of what happened inside the Proxy Suit, his brain associates with just about every bit of alarm it can scrounge together on short notice, and that is a lot of alarm.

"Nope!" The reflexive Removal briefly renders the area within one meter (or so) of Nope entirely scentless. He had explicitly warned Manchineel. He doesn't care if the first order was to "stop". She went and tried messing with his mind. No. No no no. Nope's not having it.

And thus, as Gabriel suddenly crushes the Vesper (!) and gives a deafening screech, he immediately fires back at Manchineel to rob her of consciousness, reality briefly overexposing the visuals and distorting the sound of what is happening as if things evidently needed to be even more disturbing.

Spoiler: Actions

Show

Standard Attack Manchineel. DC 27/22/22 Damage (Ranged, Improved Crit 4), Linked Weaken Resistance, Linked Affliction (Impaired+Vulnerable/Disabled+Defenseless/Incapacitated; Extra Condition). AoA -2/+2, PA -2/+2
(1d20+10)[17] Rerolled to 25

[Abracadangit]

Ariadne lunges behind one of her woven barriers, helping it to catch the Spider-Mantis' chitinous claw. A wave of nausea and numbness washes over her, as Manchineel's pheromone cloud wafts by.

"Let's not chance that one," Ariadne says, while a mesh of thread weaves itself over the lower portion of her mask. "Much better. And let us not waste such a lovely pause, hm?" Her threads coil menacingly around her, and then all dart forward to strike at once.

Spoiler: OOC

Show

Free: Change Threadworks array to Defensive Thread, gaining Immunity to gas-based attacks.
Standard: Thread Lash on Manchineel. Homing, SE, Multiattack, AoA +2/-2, Power Attack +2/-2.
Thread Lash vs. Manchineel: (1d20+10)[28]

[Dorni]

( Short on time, will edit description in later )

Spoiler: OOC

Show

Free: Maintain Ritual: Bio (Concentration Damage (Limited to Plants) Linked Concentration Weaken [Resistance] (Limited to Plants) [Poison])
Free: Set Spells to Damage gains Penetrating, Weaken gains Penetrating, Linked Restorative Healing.

Cast Bio on Manchineel. PA 4/AoA 5 (1d20+10)[16] 25. On hit, DC 29+/24+ vs Concentration Penetrating Damage / Concentration Penetrating Weaken [Resistance].
Heal self at (1d20+10)[22] Restorative cures the remaining weaken

-5 AoA

[Zelphas]

Round 4

The giant tortoise appeared in a flash of green, fouling Floral's first strike... but the second attack struck true, and the Death-empowered poison seeped into Manchineel's body with a visible blackening of veins branching out from the strike. The rest of you were quick to capitalize upon Manchineel's sudden weakness, unleashing a barrage of spell, string, and strange twists in reality. Manchineel kept herself together well enough, and the tortoise snaked out its neck to entangle Ariadne's threads, but Helios' wave of poison settled on her with painful intensity.

"FINE THEN." The voice that came out of Manchineel was twisted by pain, by confusion, by rage, but somehow most of all by terror. "You think that humanity is so great? Take it, then!" She lifted up a hand, reaching towards Floral with a horrifyingly familiar gesture--before a spasm caused her hand to twitch, and the gathering biochemical force flew just past Floral and struck Gabriel behind her. Gabriel shrieked, her body visibly twitching and twisting under the change, but kept her current form, even as the power tried to remake her once again.

Responding to an unheard signal from Manchineeel, the Spider-Mantis shook itself out of its stupor, then continued to shake, pale green liquid frothing out from all over its body. With one titanic convulsion, it spread the liquid in an arc all around it, attempting to drench all of you with potent, dangerous toxins. The giant tortoise, its neck wrapped in cutting red thread, let out a low, piteous cough, before nosing at the ground once again.

Gabriel, shaking with anger, fear, and pain, shot a burst of pinions at her hated foe.

Spoiler: OOC

Show

Manchineel

Move Action: Dazed.

Standard Action: Use Genetic Warp on Gabriel, All-out attacking for 5. Rolls are in OOC, because this could've potentially knocked out Gabriel's entire turn and made a lot of changes; Gabriel got out with 1 Bruise, Dazed, and Impaired.

Free Action: Drop the Compelled on the Spider-Mantis.

End of Turn: Regeneration kicks in; Manchineel gains 14 RP.

Spider-Mantis

Move Action: None.

Free Action: Reconfigure Abomination Weapon Array.

Standard Action: Use Overpotent Paralysis Bomb as a Selective Burst Area 1.

Ariadne: (1d20+11)[16] vs. 18 or (1d20+8)[27] Miss
Helios: (1d20+11)[18] vs. 15 or (1d20+5)[13] Hit
Floral: (1d20+11)[26] vs. 10 or (1d20)[5] Hit
Nope: (1d20+11)[25] vs. 16 or (1d20+6)[9] Hit
Gabriel: (1d20+11)[23] vs. 26, Gabriel Resistance (-2 for Impaired, DC 23): (1d20+10)[25] Miss

On a hit, Resistance DC 23 vs. Progressive Dazed & Impaired/Stunned & Disabled. This is a [Physiological][Poison] Effect.

End of Turn: Temporary Regenerate 1 Bruise.

Raskovnik

Move Action: Any luck? (1d20)[11] Forgot to add +4; not yet.

End of Turn: Regenerates 1 Bruise.

Gabriel

Move Action: Staggered, Dazed.

Standard Action: Use Debilitating Pinion on Manchineel, All-Out Power Attacking for 5. (1d20+16)[35] vs. 18. Hit
On a hit, the Raskovnik will Interpose. (1d20+13)[23] vs. DC 27/22 Damage Linked Dazed & Impaired/Stunned & Disabled. Raskovnik takes 1 Bruise

All PCs are on turn.

[Ridai]

"What the- you're human, damn it! And you need therapy! Stop playing god instead of getting therapy! Hell, I'm gonna need therapy!" Freaking supervillains.

The turtle will get in the way somehow, but Nope has to keep the pressure up. More thinking at Manchineel, while moving a bit away by pushing off the floor to not keep getting everyone blown up by the Spider-Mantis.

Spoiler: Actions

Show

Move from Y41 to X29

Standard Attack Manchineel. DC 27/22/22 Damage (Ranged, Improved Crit 4), Linked Weaken Resistance, Linked Affliction (Impaired+Vulnerable/Disabled+Defenseless/Incapacitated; Extra Condition). AoA -2/+2, PA -2/+2
(1d20+10)[30] That's a nat 20

[Quellian-dyrae]

Lily basically just ignored Spider-Mantis and its poison. But for a moment, as Manchineel began to invoke her transformative power, the fear in Lily overcame her rage, and she quailed back, "Wai-" she gasped out.

And then Manchineel unleashed that power...upon Gabriel. Cosme. The monster she had made out of one of Lily's friends. And the rage came back two-fold. "Leave her ALONE!" Lily screamed.

She wanted to give her another stab of her spear. But the Spider-Mantis would intervene and, regardless, her friend needed help. The Blight was inside her; Lily could afford to take a moment to let it do its work.

She reached out with her left hand, her arm extending towards Gabriel, growing gradually greener as it went, becoming less like a human arm and more like a vine. She smeared healing nectar over Gabriel, over the bee stings, to cure some of the damage she had taken, or possibly reverse Manchineel's partial transformation. Lily would have been content to let Gabriel be returned to her human form, if it were just a matter of tactics, but it wasn't. The transmutation hadn't fully taken, she was still part-way between her current form and her intended new form.

That was the worst part, in Lily's experience.

But even as she used her nectar to heal Gabriel, some of it dropped to the ground, landing in clumps around her. And it smelled delightful...

Spoiler

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Okay, trying something that might be stupid and we'll see what happens!

Free: Reconfigure Flower Power (+10). 8 points to Floral Blood, 1 point to Tasty Nectar Feature from Utility Nectar, 1 point to Floral Vines, 20 points to Healing Nectar, 10 points to Medicinal Nectar, 10 points to Solar Nectar, 10 points to Pheromone Scent. Descriptor is...huh, [Mental] [Pheromone] apparently, I guess Lily's power descriptions were from before I did that descriptor write-up. In the descriptor write-up sense it should probably be [Sensory/Mental] [Urge].

Move: Attempt to...I don't even know what this is. Feint? Trick? Whatever. But it's a Deception check to try to make it more likely that Raskovnik gets affected by my attack!! I have Animal Empathy and the will to use it! -5 for move action, +2 for Favored Foe (Manchineel's Minions). (1d20+7)[23]. It smells so good and it's so tasty and nutritious! How can you pass it up!?

Standard: Heal Gabriel with Solar Nectar (Persistent Restorative Healing) at (1d20+10)[13]. If this fails to produce at least 14 RP, spend a Growing a New Future reroll for (1d10+20)[24]. If it gives her enough RP to recover, my suggestion is triggering her Recover action to get rid of the Staggered, or using the Restorative to remove the Impaired. Linked attack Raskovnik with Pheromone Scent at (1d20+10)[20]. On a hit, Resistance DC 20 vs. Entranced/Compelled/Controlled Affliction, Limited to One Command which can't get him to work against his goals for the scene. The command would be to do nothing but keep eating the nectar. It is both nutritious and tasty, and can fertilize plants! Reroll spent, Gabriel gets 14 RP plus another 7 for Persistent.

End of Turn: Secondary Effect triggers. Manchineel gets Resistance DC 25@+5 vs. [Physiological] [Poison] Limited to Plants Impaired+Vulnerable/Disabled+Defenseless Affliction Linked Weaken Resistance and Effect.

Current Status: Fatigued, Floral Blood (-4 Def/+4 Res).
GaNF: 1/2.

[Abracadangit]

[fluff pending]

Spoiler: OOC

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Move: Moving to AB47.
Action: Thread Lash, against Manchineel, with Homing, Multiattack, and Secondary Effect. AoA for +3/-3, PA for +3/-3.
Thread Lash vs. Machineel: (1d20+10)[25]

[Dorni]

"Are you insane!?" Helios' cry was cut off by the spider-mantis' poison blast, forcing him to juggle aligning his wards while maintaining his hold on his own poison spell.

"The Deathwell didn't just kill Lucia and the other campers, it raised them as shades!" He didn't know how or when she'd done it, but he recognized the concentrated Death embued in Lily's spear. His teammate was a genius, but Lily wasn't a magic user. She'd had to have dipped the spear in the deathwell or taken material from it. Probably more than once. It was a wonder she hadn't harmed herself. Or perhaps she'd hidden it well.

"Manchineel's spirit is already more loosely tethered to her body after having been raised once! The more Death you inject her with the easier you make it for her to rise again. And next time she might possess something more dangerous than than a tree!"

He needed to put Manchineel down quick and contain her spirit before too much Death built up. His poison spell had already sunk into her, so he fed more aether into it. He could see Manchineel's veins turning black as the corrosive poison spread through her.

Spoiler: OOC

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Move: One day going to make this useful
Standard: Maintain Concentration. DC 29 vs Damage & Weaken [Resistance]

[Zelphas]

Round... 5?

The giant tortoise somehow interposes itself between Manchineel and the terrible concept of chartreuse, and comes out of the situation only a bit worse for wear (perhaps its non-human mind allowed it to comprehend chartreuse more easily). It looks down at Floral's spread of golden nectar, head ducking down with greedy speed to consume the tasty treat while ignoring everything else. The Spider-Mantis, still trailing pale green poison, leaps between Manchineel and Ariadne's cutting threads; its blades win out against the cutting edge of the threads and tear the mystical threading to pieces, though the cloud still swirls around it, ready to strike. Manchineel, untouched by any strike, gathers herself for another burst of power--

And gasps. Shudders, as veins turn black beneath bark-like skin. steps backward, as if to flee, then falls to her knees, then her face.

A moment later, she begins to rise again--wait, that's not right. Manchineel remains laying on the ground; her body is still visibly breathing, though the breaths are shallow, laced with pain. What rises up from the head and shoulders of Manchineel is wispy, translucent, and seemingly human, lacking the woodland elements of Manchineel's normal form.

Colorless, holding a still shape, The head, neck, and shoulders of Lucia Urquhart look around frantically, her ghostly eyes filled with real terror. "It's still after me," her voice, still the voice of Manchineel, is somehow very far away. "I lost myself trying to escape, and I thought I had, but its claws are on my skin again. Please, I'm sorry, none of this makes sense. I want to be a biologist. Biology doesn't work like this, it shouldn't, but I found it within me. I didn't know it would take... what did I do? What do I... do I have to run again? Please, do you know what's happening? Is it close? What should I do?"

Spoiler: Helios, Mystic Senses Perception DC 25, nested

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This series of events unfolds itself to you according to your Mystic Senses in a unique way. What's going on here is ludicrously complicated, but you sense powerful Life and Death energy coming from Manchineel as she is now, twisted together and interwoven in a form you're not really sure what to do with.

Spoiler: DC 30

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Lucia Urquhart is connected to Life in a way that is both deeply powerful and somehow deeply limited to your senses; she isn't a magic user, but her Life power would manifest itself in certain very specific ways that you can only speculate on based on what you've seen. Calling her a shade possessing a tree is not incorrect, but not the whole story; she would likely have manifested powers similar to Manchineel's regardless, by your estimation. The Death power seems more like an infection--and you can guess where it came from--but it has both aggravated her natural Life powers and intertwined with them, to the point that separating the two is a task you can't even be sure is possible at all, let alone doable by someone with your level of magical knowledge.

The Spider-Mantis shrieks, seeing its maker and mistress fall, a high warbling noise. Unable to sense the magical power Helios used to bring down Manchineel, it leaps towards the last thing it saw attack her: Ariadne. Without any pretense of self-protection, it swings.

Meanwhile, the four-leafed clovers on the back of the giant tortoise begin to glow a deep, soft green. The glow spreads out in a wave, washing around Helios, Gabriel, Ariadne, and Floral--but somehow washing through Manchineel and the Spider-Mantis. Wounds are closed and pains healed by this strike, and the glow remains over them both, a comforting wave of warmth.

A moment later, Gabriel shrieks, shattering the tableau once again. She wheels around and fires a barrage of pointed pinions at Manchineel's downed form, even as Manchineel's flesh-warping power continues to work on her.

Spoiler: OOC

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Map.

Manchineel Lucia

Turn: Life and Death are in balance. No turn.

Spider-Mantis

Move Action: Shift to AB46.

Free Action: Reconfigure Abomination Weapon Array.

Standard Action: Use Destabilizing Enervating Delay Scythe on Ariadne, All-Out Attacking for 5. (1d20+18)[24] On a hit, Resistance DC 28/23 vs. Secondary Effect Damage Linked Weaken Defense and Attack Bonus. Hit

End of Turn: Full Regenerate 1 Bruise.

Raskovnik

Move Action: Dazed.

Standard Action: Unlock Potential activates! Since it was only a 20, it activates once. Since the last effect that struck the Raskovnik was attached to a Healing effect, it becomes Unlock Healing.
Healing check on Manchineel: (1d20+12)[15] 5 RP; 1 Bruise Healed.
Healing check on the Spider-Mantis: (1d20+12)[26] 16 RP; last Bruise Healed.
Manchineel and the Spider-Mantis also gain +12 to their Regeneration Ranks for one full round.

End of Turn: Regenerate 1 Bruise.

Gabriel

Move Action: Dazed.

Standard Action: Use Debilitating Pinion on Manchineel, All-Out Power Attacking for 5. (1d20+14)[23] Manchineel is Incapacitated, so Defenseless, which makes this an auto-crit.
The Spider-Mantis will Interpose, if Floral doesn't want to beat it to the punch: (1d20+15)[16] vs. DC 32/27 Damage Linked Dazed & Impaired/Stunned & Disabled (Cumulative, Secondary Effect). DC should have been 33/27 to account for the Bruise, which means Gabriel INCAPACITATES the Spider-Mantis.

End of turn 1: Roll to remove Impaired (DC 24): (1d20+10)[27] This is what I get

End of Turn 2: Secondary Effect vs. Affliction (DC 24; add 2 if Impaired is removed): (1d20+10)[28] For basing this character off of Fen.

All PCs are up.

[Quellian-dyrae]

When the Spider-Mantis swung at Ariadne, Lily moved simultaneously, getting between the two and taking the scything swing across her stomach. Had she been a normal human, she'd have been disemboweled. But with wood-strong flesh reinforced by stored solar energy it was merely a deep cut. Ehh...make that a shallow cut, actually, as the stored energy in her nectar instantly healed about half of it.

(Somewhere in the back of her mind, some part of her brain that didn't seem to have any connection to reality whatsoever chimed in that she should have played more dwarves at Bruno's table growing up, because resistance to poison was actually pretty great. Thank you, random part of brain. That is extremely helpful information. Quiet time now, grown-ups are busy.)

Feeding the turtle...triggered it to heal the enemy team. Well okay then. An experimental result is an experimental result.

She didn't really have much time to do much more about the Spider-Mantis than body-check its attack, because the next moment it went to body-check Gabriel's attack and got basically turned from half spider half mantis to one-third spider one-third mantis one-third feathery pincushion. ...Maybe more like 25%/25%/50%, actually.

She moved, then, to get between Gabriel and Manchineel, "Cosme, stop!" she said, not loudly, more so she could read her lips than anything. She also held one hand out, palm forward. She wasn't...actually sure if that was the actual official ASL sign for stop, but it was a pretty universally recognized sign for it so she gave it a shot. "We have a way to contain her, and it sounds like killing her won't actually stop her anyway so let's please not do that." She couldn't even begin to sign all that short of spelling it out one letter at a time so she'd just go with lip reading.

Lily moving to defend Manchineel might have seemed strange, given she was the person who had, you know, concocted a virulent poison specifically tailored to target Manchineel's unique biology and then infused it with Death magic energy just to try give it a bit of extra kick in her efforts to defeat her. But defeat was the key word there. Yes, Lily feared Manchineel. Yes, Lily hated her. Yes, Lily was angry with her, furious with her, would never forgive her for what she had done. Lily would grasp at any weapon, take any risk to herself, to see Manchineel stopped. And yes, if she were entirely honest, there was a part of her that wanted nothing more than to see Manchineel dead.

Lily Woods was not perfect. She certainly wasn't perfectly forgiving.

But she was still the sort of person who had decided as a child to end world hunger, and had only become more determined to do so as she grew up. She was still the sort of person who drew the ticket for "Anthropomorphic Flower" in the Superpower Lottery and still said, "Yep, I'm going to become a superhero and use that power to help people." She was still the sort of person who when she wasn't out fighting the League of the Future and their minions, was devising new medicines, new ways to better feed the people in the Dome, repairing damage, healing injuries. She was still a hero. And she was not a killer.

It wasn't an ultimate an inviolable fact. She would take a risk with Manchineel's life, absolutely. She had calculated that incorporating the power of Camp Bubble Brook into her spear might risk making the Blight deadly to her. She deemed the odds reasonably low, just on Manchineel's sheer power, but did not pretend they were negligible. She had considered the possibility, acknowledged it existed, and consciously decided to do it anyway, because stopping Manchineel was important enough to take the risk of killing her. Because she wasn't perfect.

But there was a vast gulf between that, and actually intending to kill her, if killing her was not necessary to stop her.

She glanced at Helios. She didn't know magic like he did. She could admit that the death energy causing Manchineel, or Lucia, or whoever it actually was, to possibly wander free as a ghost and possibly rise anew, had not strictly occurred to her. Lily still had a hard time wrapping her head around notions of souls and spirits on an intuitive level. That all said, she had considered various possible ways this could go wrong. She didn't have Helios's understanding of magic, but from what she was seeing and hearing...this seemed to fall in comfortably higher than her worst expected case scenario. (Which was some shade about as powerful as the one they had fought would pop out and start attacking both them and Manchineel indiscriminately.)

"That...sounds like it only matters if she dies? So we just...heal the Blight out of her and it should be fine?"

(She kinda didn't acknowledge Lucia's shade at all. She didn't have the bandwidth for that. She chalked that one up as "leave it to the mages".)

Spoiler

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Persuasion to try to get Gabriel to stand down: (1d20+10)[22].

Lily's setting Favored Environment to Defense and setting Floral Blood to full.

Just to cap off my run of using insanely niche abilities in this battle, I actually have Precise Healing, so I can make sure to only heal the Blight and stuff without waking her up. Also Stabilize Healing for whatever that's worth here.

[Ridai]

Nope is heard going "What?!" from the distance as he hears about the whole Deathwell energy poison bsuiness, quickly moving back in again.

Seeing Manchineel topple over feels weirdly surreal. More alarming is the spirit of Lucia rising out of the body. Cosme exploding the Spider-Mantis. The turtle doing a healing wave. Helios and Floral starting to discuss what to do.

Nope feels like there is no time left. There is the slightest chance he might be able to fix the core issue. He runs over to Lucia.

"Lucia, focus! Even if it doesn't make sense, tell me what is coming after you! Now!"

If Nope can conceptualize what is coming after Lucia, he can Remove it.

[Abracadangit]

Ariadne watches everything unfold, with a skeptical sort of attention. She wants to believe that there's a way to extract Lucia from Manchineel, but she's not sure where one entity ends and the other begins.

She turns her attention to Gabriel, approaching quickly.

"This one may be saved, yet," Ariadne says, uncharacteristically soft. "We need more time."

Spoiler: OOC

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Dropping a Silken Shields on Manchineel, while people do their stuff.

[Dorni]

Helios held out a hand for Nope to stay back. He appreciated the effort, but... "Its more complicated than that." he replied, not-quite under his breath. "Too many elements are entwined in her. If you try to remove pieces her spirit will collapse."

They could destroy Lucia, but there was no guarantee manchineel wouldn't rise again. They always had that option, but while he had no qualms about destroying Manchineel, Lucia was different. He wasn't sure the frightened camper who died in the forest deserved that. On the other hand, stabilizing Lucia would be difficult work. He wasn't sure if fully untangling her spirit was even possible. But every effort had to start somewhere.

"Its alright!" He called, raising both hands for peace as he approached the spirit. "Its alright. Calm down. We're here to help." First off, it would be a lot easier to help her if she cooperated.

Spoiler: OOC

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Move: Nah
Standard: Talk down Lucia. Persuasion (1d20+15)[17]