Vaudevillain

While Shizuka and Rampart continued their conversation, Yuppie chased after the retreating island. The space between him and the command center surprised him; Yuppie could barely make out the floating shelter in the distance. Waves churned along the island's edges. Yuppie assumed some hidden engines were the cause of all the turbulence.

As Yuppie flew closer, he started to make out more details. The floating island didn't have much on it, only a couple of buildings, but everything about its construction screamed warfare. The shelters on the moving base resembled pill bunkers, with wide, thin windows and circular design. Various sandbags lay strewn across the walkways as makeshift cover, and Yuppie caught glimpses of weapons resting under them. The only building that didn't look decked out in military gear was a longhouse sitting right on the vessel's bow.

Right now, Yuppie didn't have to worry about staying hidden. There was no one walking around on top of the island. But the hero knew that would change when the vessel landed again. To minimize his chances of discovery, Yuppie flew as high as possible, shrinking his figure to a speck. Though while flying high lessened the odds to get found, it made it hard for Yuppie to get a good look at the enemy.

It was then the hero remembered his targeting computer and the magnification function that came with it. The player had installed it a while back, combining a pair of binoculars with his helmet to see what happened. He hadn't thought it would come in handy when he created the thing. Yuppie's character didn't have anything with a long enough range to use the function effectively.

Yuppie activated his targeting computer, focusing on the island below and magnifying. The bunkers, longhouse, and various sandbags came into focus, giving the hero a perfect image of his target. He watched as the island sailed to an alcove hidden behind some rocks, landing on the coast like a beached whale. Large pillars shot out of the island's port and starboard sides, drilling into the dirt and latching onto the shore.

Yuppie opened up his communicator, watching as the longhouse door opened and a ramp descended. Rampart had said to report anything to Dextra, but the hero must have forgotten that Yuppie didn't have a communicator to reach the player. Instead, he called his friends.

"This is Yuppie," he said. "You there, Fur? Psy?"

"Kinda busy," he heard Fursation grunt.

"Whatcha need?" Psy-Ops asked.

"I've got the island's current location," Yuppie explained. "It looks like they're offloading a bunch of players."

The hero watched as the ramp fell onto the beach, kicking up a bit of sand in the process. People that Yuppie could only assume to be players walked out of the longhouse in groups of two to four players. Each wore the same urban military garb as the team he faced before, and he noticed a few carrying large backpacks.

"You got coordinates?" Psy-Ops questioned.

Yuppie opened up his map and looked at his location, "Only a latitude and longitude."

The player quickly read off the location to Psy-Ops, who recorded the info to pass along. As he did, Yuppie watched as the groups of players assembled, milling about like restless children. Once the last player disembarked, the hero saw a man emerge from one of the bunkers.

The man in question had striking good looks, like he was chiseled from marble, and wore an altered military uniform with a large V printed in silver. To the man's right was a player dressed like Yuppie, a pair of buzzing wings hovering the man just off the ground. To the man's right was a man dressed in a general's costume, with the stars and everything hanging off his shirt. They moved as a unit toward the waiting group of players.

Yuppie was too far away to hear, but the man with a V on his shirt started speaking.

"I think I found their leader," Yuppie said to Psy-Ops.

"Hold on. Shizuka just found me. I'm going to give her my communicator so she can relay what you say to Dextra."

The sound of cloth hit Yuppie's ears for a second before Shizuka's chipper voice spoke, "Hey there, Yupster. What's the down-low?"

"The what?" Yuppie asked despite knowing he shouldn't.

"The four-one-one, the skinny, I'm asking you to spill the beans," Shizuka rambled. "I could go on, but I hope you get the point."

Yuppie shook his head, focusing back on the task at hand. "Whatever. I think I found the enemy leader. He's wearing urban camouflage with a large V on his chest. There's two others next to him, probably sub-leaders. One is in power armor like I am but has bug wings on his back. The other is dressed like an army general."

"Roger dodger," Shizuka said. "Let me relay that to Dex real quick. Then you can give me some more info."

Yuppie looked back down at the man giving his speech. It looked like he was starting to rouse the players now, and the hero could see a few of them making cheering motions. Noises began to assault Yuppie's ears. Not from the communicator, but from shouting players down below. The player strained to make out the words until the leader threw a fist in the air and chanted. The players all roared after him, giving Yuppie precisely what he wanted.

"Trollstompers!!! Trollstompers!!!" the crowd chanted.

"Hey," Yuppie said into the communicator. "Tell Dex that this group is called Trollstompers."

"Righty-o daddy-o," Shizuka replied.

Matt-att the streamer looked over his newly formed faction and smiled. It was the group's first foray into working together, and the man couldn't ask for things to go better. He and Ixzay worked on creating the faction's structure, pulling in Generalissimo, or Gen since his name was so long, to be the strategist down the line. Ixzay was the lead foreman for crafting, and Matt oversaw everything.

The team immediately went to work designing the faction's gear, producing lines of factories that pumped out explosives, firearms, and armor for anyone who had the materials. Gen and Matt then started structuring their fighting force. They split Players that already worked well together into individual groups, their leader becoming the point of contact. The two then grouped the teams into larger forces, led by Gen for now, but the plan was to pull any exemplar people up the ranks after this battle. Anyone that joined solo got automatically grouped into the larger forces, at least until they found their own team.

"We ready to go?" Matt-att asked Gen.

"Should be," the player replied. "We've sent enough teams to scout for secret entrances that one should have gotten into the heroes guild base by now. All we need to do is distract everyone up top long enough."

"F*ck yeah," Matt-att replied. "Ixzay, how's our tech looking?"

"It's not like I have to do maintenance on it, Val," Ixzay replied.

"Come on, Ix. Go with the flow here. We look like we're going to war. I gotta ask about everything."

Ixzay sighed and performed a listless salute, "Everything's in tip-top shape, captain."

"That's more like it," Matt answered, clapping his friend on the back.

This fight was the team's first foray into large scale battles, so Matt-att didn't want to mess anything up. He'd even switched his stream to subscriber-only chat for the moment to keep any trolls from spamming.

It felt fitting that the first war Trollstompers joined involved Dr. Zlo, considering he was the entire reason for the guild. Matt would have liked to have a team at each of the cities, but his guild's size was unfortunately too small. He didn't have enough people to make a plan for each location. So the streamer focused on the one he knew best, Haven.

Of course, fighting a war in World of Supers was tricky. Without a death penalty, players could respawn and jump right back into the fight. So Trollstompers needed a way to stop that respawning, or at least limit it. The solution he came to was the heroes guild.

Every guild had an AI computer inside of it that listed villains and their crimes. Usually, a player could go to any computer around the world and receive a quest, netting some reputation. However, the computer only listed villains, not heroes. With the rise of factions, Matt-att knew that heroes and villains would team up to act out worldwide, which meant the computers would only keep records of the villains involved. So Matt-att had worked with Ixzay to create a virus that hijacked the system.

Once uploaded, heroes involved with Menagerie would find themselves listed on the computer like a criminal, which should cause NPCs and other players to go after them. It wasn't a perfect solution to the respawn problem, but it did make it difficult for players to move about together freely. Once NPCs got involved, it would take a lot of work to hold onto Haven.

Menagerie's solution to respawns was impressive as well, and Matt-att applauded whoever came up with the answer so quickly. Locking down respawn points by sticking players to the ground was a great quick-and-dirty solution. As long as it didn't do damage, players could leave behind almost anything at respawn points. As long as you knew where players would appear, it was a simple task to lay down a trap.

But the issue was that players on both sides of the conflict would get caught up in the trap, limiting allied forces and enemy ones. Matt-att liked his solution better since it ruined only one side. Though, the player did admit that the sticky traps were simpler to set up than infiltrating a heroes guild to list everyone in Menagerie as a villain. However, the player would take an elegant solution over something quick and dirty any day of the week.

Matt-att looked back over his group of cheering players, throwing his fist in the air again to cheer along with them. They still needed to find Dr. Zlo's bomb, but he would leave that to the special ops teams. Valiant the hero led his troops from the front. And when Dr. Zlo came, the two would go at it once again, finishing their unfinished fight from before.

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