"This is not a bacterial situation. Turn the fucking thing off. Now."
    "Well, there's no need to be rude."
    "Do it, now," Thunderbolt seconded.
    We opened up and got out. Ezra was mumbling something in a shocked voice about how I really couldn't talk like that, it just wasn't done; I gave him a weird look and realized that he wasn't kidding. In the future, people don't swear? I'm going to hate this place.
    "Why don't I go ahead and scout?" Ezra volunteered, which seemed like a good idea. He poked his head through the door. There was a Power standing there, buzzing and glowing gently blue. The glow faded.
    "Whoa. What just happened?" He turned, saw Ezra's head sticking through the wall and turned blue again, jumped back and landed in a crouch. Ezra pulled back just as a power blast shattered the doors.
    "Oh, this is going to be so un-fun," I sighed, seeing this. The Power was in the doorway. We all remained still; I scanned it and learned what an infected bio-aura looks like. But there was still someone else there. A moment later the blue glow faded and an orderly was standing there, confused.
    "What's going on? I was just in the hall, and now I'm out... here, and... who are you people?"
    I held my hands out. "There's been a problem at the hospital, we're here to help."
    "You were here earlier today, you dropped those people off."
    "Yes."
    "Who are you?"
    "We're the Revolution. It's a long story."
    "Okay." He took refuge in his profession. "There's a problem at the hospital, what do you need me to do? It's obvious we've lost power, there are people inside who are on life support, do you need me to show you where they are?"
    "No," various of us answered in overlapped chorus, still trying to keep things calm. We didn't want to get him upset, and it was hard to say what might do that.
    "We need your help with something," Thunderbolt said.
    "Oh. Yes, whatever you need. Is this going to become a trauma center, will you be moving people out here?"
    "What kind of reading are you getting now?" T-bolt murmured to me.
    "There's still something there."
    "Can you turn off your force belt?" he asked the man. He did so.
    "No, it's definitely there." It would take more than disabling that to get this... whatever it was, intelligent computer code, out of its victims.
    "What? What's definitely there?" he wanted to know. "What's wrong?"
    "Nothing. Nothing." Damn. I tried to think of something to distract him. "Stay here, there may be some casualties coming up."
    "Okay, I'll... what do you mean, something's wrong?" He looked suspicious; was that a blue flicker?
    "We're trying to keep you out of the noise you might hear below," Cockatrice suggested; there was clearly a lot of violence going on in there.
    The man nodded uncertainly at that. "I'll stay up here and if you send anyone else up we'll start organizing a trauma center here."
    "Thank you very much for your help," Cockatrice said and touched him in passing; the man slumped to the ground.
    "What was that?!" I asked.
    "He should remain unconscious for some time."
    Clearly our new friend is more than just a man in a chicken costume. We moved into the hospital, Ezra phasing a little ahead of us. This area seemed clear; the Powers were busily engaged in combat with one another. It looked like all of the staff on these floors had been infected. So there were patients in need surrounded by glowing blue people trying to beat the crap out of each other and destroying a lot of walls, floors, and equipment in the process. And we'd forgotten to tell the people on the other floors to turn off their belts, so if any of the Powers got down there....
    Ezra went down to remedy that oversight. There were a lot of police down there, and they had the area sealed off as they tried to figure out what was going on.
    "Hold your fire!" Ezra told them, becoming visible. "I am... uh. Uh, I am the Bosonic Man! Of the Revolution! I bring a message! All the hospital personnel have to turn off their force fields, or otherwise they might become Powers." The rest of his statement was drowned by the erupting panic as people rushed to turn off their belts. "All right. We're gonna see what we can do. Uh, trust us, we're superheroes." He zipped back upwards.
    Meanwhile, the rest of us spread out a bit and moved forward. Stephanie stayed on the ship and kept an eye on our Sleeping Beauty; her powers, while certainly useful in their context, were not exactly up to this battle. We saw five of them fighting in an operating room, their combat continuing around the unconscious form of the man with the missing cybernetic limbs. Astonishingly enough, he hadn't been hit yet.
    I put up a force field over the injured man in hopes of protecting him from any stray force blasts and flying objects. All the Powers stopped and turned. "That may have been a bad move on my part...."
    One of them saw that his immediate opponent was distracted, hit him in the back with a force blast and knocked him forward. Then Cockatrice hurled a smoke bomb; it exploded in mid-air as a force blast hit it, and he dodged another blast. They were fighting one another now in the darkness, and it seemed they were weaker than the first Power, as they were able to hurt each other with the blasts. I could feel their auras, knew I could touch them, but wasn't sure what good it would do. Thunderbolt made an attempt at disrupting one of the Powers' energy patterns. To the rest of us it looked like one of them had fired a blast at him, but the blue glow wrapped itself tamely around his arm. One of the men returned to normal and sputtered in confusion as another Power prepared to turn him into a stain on the floor. Cockatrice dove into the fray with a staff in his hands and dealt a vicious blow to one of the Powers.
    "Very impressive," Thunderbolt murmured.
    Ezra rejoined us just then, looking in from the hallway, then phasing into the room proper.
    The one Cockatrice had attacked brought his hand up on power-blast autofire, apparently working on hearing alone as the cloaked man spun and dodged out of the way. Two others fired at one another, sending one of them into the wall, the other down the hall, through the Bosonic Man in our direction, while another one took out the overhead lights.
    I focused carefully and locked onto one of the nearby Powers. Time to experiment; I hit the man as gently as I could; he groaned and fell down. The blue sheathe of energy did its best to get back up, but didn't seem to be able to do so.
    "Paul, hit that."
    He had his own issues; he could feel the code trying to take over his thoughts as he tried to figure out where to put it. Threat matrix. Her, him... Effective means of terminating opposition? He forced the stuff out of his thoughts and threw the energy towards a chair, where it flickered for a moment and then died.
    "What the hell is going on?!" the newly depossessed orderly yelled in a panic.
    "Get down!" Thunderbolt barked back.
    "Okay."
    "And turn your belt off!"
    Ezra couldn't see much other than the glowing Powers. One of them was on the ground and trying to get up. He tried to disintegrate the belt pack on that one but missed it. Cockatrice had the same idea, and the plastic shattered under the impact of his staff's tip. Without the mechanical enhancement to the man's bioaura, the blue glow diminished though it did not disappear entirely.
    I made sure the one I had hit wasn't going to die on us and looked around for another one. Two new people had turned the corner into the hall.
    "Hey, what're you—" one of them said, and the blue glow came to life around him, and I moved out of the way, fast. We had taken two of them and now there were five again. The other one hit Thunderbolt with a power blast, but he had a better feel for it now.
    Ezra blasted another of them, sending him flying backward into the wall. With a buzz of blue energy, he got back up.
    Cockatrice went after another force belt and missed it. Thunderbolt exerted himself to draw as much of the blue energy as possible to himself, noticed in doing so that our ally from 2086 was wearing both an anti-grav harness and something that generated an unknown form of energy. A moment later he was fully cloaked in the blue glow; he raised his hand.
    "Um, Thunderbolt...?"
    He threw all of it into that chair, which was blown to smithereens. Everyone in the room was left asking "What happened?"
    "You're turning your belts off, right now," he told them. "Trust us."
    "Uh, okay...." They hesitated.
    "Shut them off, now," Cockatrice growled as the clearing smoke revealed him. It said a lot for the man that he could actually look threatening while dressed like that.
    "Well, that seems to have worked," I said, not entirely sure I shouldn't be worried; Thunderbolt looked a little odd. "Good job."
    Seven of them were out of action. That left... quite a few, judging from all the noise. We checked to make sure Punch wasn't infected and locked the door behind us so the hospital staff could keep working on him, and on each other as the one I had knocked down was going to need some attention.
    There was another cluster of nine at the nurses' station, or at the pile of rubble where it had once stood, all fighting one another. Ezra hid behind and inside some rubble and took aim at a force belt, hoping to weaken one of them. The Power dimmed just as two others attacked her; she was unconscious, at least.
    "Are you feeling okay?" I asked Thunderbolt.
    "I don't know yet. Starting to think five or six might be the limit."
    "Be careful."
    
    

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