The Dark Mother (IC)

[Electra]

As the darkness grew around them in the disabled vehicle, Erin held her breath and opened her mask for a moment, just long enough to put on the sunglasses Trevor had given her for her birthday. As the sealed mask cleared the accumulated water and allowed her to breathe again, the world came into sharp focus and she followed Trevor to the hatches. It was an imposing sight, but she focused in on the immediate mission at hand, lest she be overwhelmed by the alien strangeness of their surroundings, or the sheer number of undead foes. "I'm going to go for the ones close to the boat first," she told the others. "Anyone who can shoot at the ones further away, do it. For God's sake, nobody get bit."

With that, she unfolded her bat and took off like a shot, forsaking the dubious safety of the ship for the cold waters and the enemies outside. They had to get the ones closest to the ship before it was disabled entirely!

[Avenger Assembled]

Fusion stepped out into darkness with the others, feeling the comforting grip of the ocean's depths all around her. For all the assembled heroes, it was immensely dark and fantastically cold in the ocean's depths, a world as alien as any far-off exotic world. They could hear screams and curses echoing through the water, feel the vibration of the Atlantean ships through the icy, crushing depths all around them, but the battle itself was an ominous mystery. Closing her eyes and extending her tentacles, Fusion could feel the battle raging all around her, a scene that became more obvious to the other heroes when one of the Atlantean gunships fired a flare over the battlefield. It was a grim scene indeed.

Atlantean warriors were locked in battle with hordes of little vampire manta rays, their armor and gleaming mystic weapons their sole protection against the beasts' terrible snapping jaws. The king himself was in battle against what was, of all things, a another giant vampire squid, struggling mightly against his tentacles. The battle was ferocious, but by the light of the flickering flare, as vampires were sliced asunder into oily ash, they seemed to be holding their own. "Quickly!" the king shouted to the others. "We'll hold them off! You must destroy the temple!" He pointed down below, to the crack in the sea floor where an eerie red glow marked the only natural light in the area. "Go quickly!"

"I've got this one! Hang on everybody!" The fastest swimmer in the group, or at least the most adept at navigating the underwater depths, Fusion shouted a warning to the others before she lashed out with her tentacles, grabbing her fellow heroes by the ankles before she opened her mouth and fired a jet of bubbling water from beneath her arms, blasting them all right through the line of rays and straight for the rift! The water warmed as they approached, a sharp contrast to the freezing bottom, and down inside the crack they could make out a rough-hewn structure as big as a Claremont dorm carved from the living volcanic rock itself!

[Fox]

Gaian Knight blinked as the temple came into view, his rocks pulled along behind him as he himself was pulled along behind Fusion. They built their temple on a divergent boundary out of...oh, that's beautiful. This should be fun. As soon as he had a chance he unwound himself from the aquatic heroine's tentacles, holding up a hand and taking off through the water on his platform, headed not for the temple but for the nearest piece of ocean bed he could find. He didn't even slow down - if anything, he sped up as the earth silently split open to allow him passage.

Time to smack the beehive.

In very short order, though he couldn't be seen, the whole temple started to shift on its foundation, tipping and becoming unstable in places as the earthmover burrowed around and around beneath it. When he finally popped back into the water - close to where he'd entered the ocean floor in the first place - Gaian Kight admired his handywork for only a moment before sweeping two glowing hands upward. Two very important constructions put themselves together: first, and likely less appreciated by the heroes outside, nearly every large room in the temple suddenly sprouted a human hand out of its floor, every hand a fist with a single index finger pointing straight up in silent warning. Second, and certainly not something any temple-dwellers were going to appreciate in a few moments, rubble and raw stone came together from across the trench to form a massive, building-sized construct of spiked rock. It hung there for a moment, a giant earthen Sword of Damocles, before beginning its decent through the water toward the roof of the already partially-collapsing temple.

[Supercape]

"Goodness!" exclaimed Supercape, as he was propelled by Fusion through the unimaginable depths and pressures of the deep dark sea.

"Goodness!" he exclaimed again as he entered the temple, and the warm rush of water hit him. Rather pleasant he thought, reminded him of his trip to Iceland for an academic conference a few years ago. Professor Austenweiser had delivered a rather interesting lecture on thermal terrametakinesis...

Snap out of it! Wake up! he told himself, we are at war, man! he admonished himself. However, he too was caught be the magnificent splendour of the temple. Just how were they meant to destroy a temple made of living rock?

[Electra]

Though she was entirely out of her depth, no pun intended, in these dark waters, Wander at least had a really good idea of how to destroy things. Taking off through the water as quickly as though she were leaping through the air, she followed the descending mass of rock, getting above it and beginning to push. It was already moving at a good clip, and with her momentum behind it, it only fell faster, descending towards the damaged temple quickly enough to send waves rippling through the deep water.

[Avenger Assembled]

The temple was already crumbling under Gaian Knight's bombardment, and Wander's attack was the final straw that broke the camel's back. Under the weight of falling rocks, not only did the temple's igneous walls give way, but the whole rockface beneath crumbled away and deep into the underwater pit nearby. The temple collapsed into the rift below with a roar muffled by the sheer quantity of water all around them, a cloud of thick, black, oily filth rising into the water as the dark temple plunged into the cleansing heart of the earth itself.

That, of course, didn't eliminate the threat of the undersea monsters, but with the heart of their temple destroyed and their controller fled or dead, the vampire sea monsters had the heart go out of them. Literally, sometimes, as superheroes and Atlanteans closed in on them in fantastic displays of undersea combat. Fusion was everywhere in the fight, at home and in her element as she grabbed and decapitated sea-monsters left and right, tearing through legions of vampire squid and rays, until finally the cloud of monsters parted and she saw a whale bearing down on her...a red-eyed sperm whale whose mouth glittered with gigantic fangs!

"Let's go!" she exclaimed, raising her fists and arms as she charged the great beast!

[Gizmo]

Even with his training putting him on equal footing underwater, so to speak, Midnight was well aware that the proverbial big guns were better suited to dealing with the bulk of the massive horde. Instead, he remained close to the beleaguered vessel and smoothly drew a pair of sinuous cables that had been wrapped around compartments at the top and bottom of his belt. The vigilante took a brief moment to retrieve a pair of small blades forged of etched gold from his belt, dodging the lunge of a hissing manta ray as he did so, and attached them to the cables' tips. With a flick, the whips lit up with carefully controlled electrical shocks, arcing through the murky depths and tearing the vampiric fish to pieces. Spinning back around to the battle at large, Midnight proceeded to hold the line shoulder to shoulder with the Atlantean troops.

[Supercape]

Supercape floated through the dark seas, and concentrated his mind. He could sense the swarming fish and seething beasts around him. This was a war like none he had ever seen, and none he had even read about. And he doubted any conventional treatise on tactics would suffice anyway.

Turning his attention to what he presumed was the greater mass of vampire beasts, he recalled the King's words. Hoping that science would suffice as well as the mysterious and illogical world of magic, he focussed on a few molecules of water in the centre of the army, shifting a few quarks this way and that way.

Only tiny amounts of matter where destroyed, but massive amounts of ultravoilet radiation were created, in an explosive bloom, permeating and penetrating a large swathe of the vampire army.

Lets see how the fangs like that...

[Avenger Assembled]

After great and terrible battle below the surface, finally the vampire menace was defeated. Atlantis and Freedom City could both breathe easy that night now that the heroes of the surface had helped the armies undersea defeat the terrible power of Hydra and Dagon. The heroes had the thanks of a grateful Atlantis, not to mention a somewhat abashed Nereid, who looked completely recovered from her brush with vampirism. "I must need to spend more time in the sun," she said with a rueful laugh, embracing everyone after showing off the scar left behind by her bite.

"You have the thanks of all Atlantis," said Theseus warmly, "and the gratitude of a king. My family and I are forever in your debt."