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Merelisa Shaynore <Q-Conversation> (NPC) Lala says, "Everyone! We've found the X-Ray Detector, lun!"
<Q-Conversation> (NPC) Lala says, "It's a little far from the ship, but once we bring it back, we can use it to find Yuma, lun!"
<Q-Conversation> (NPC) Lala says, "So if you don't mind--"
<Q-Conversation> (NPC) Lala gets interrupted by a crashing sound coming through her mic and distant cackling, then Hikaru's yell.
<Q-Conversation> (NPC) Hikaru Hoshina exclaims, before getting cut off, "Eyewon--?!"

    For once, the girls aren't waiting at the crash site when you drop out of the wormhole. In this forest, even with the collective tracking and futuresight abilities you all have, it might take a while to navigate around the oversized flora, but there's still one helpful figure positioned in the clearing for you. A faster-than-speech conversation between the subtly distressed AI and Depthcharge provides their last coordinates and the fastest route to get to them, and then it's a run or ride in a direction you've never gone before to interrupt whatever made Hikaru and Lala cut off their broadcast like that.

    Tangled roots as thick as you are tall jut out of the ground and spill down the muddy incline beyond the treeline, and the breeze carries a sourly metallic smell. Clambering on top of a root or otherwise to get a vantage point on the clearing, the smell emanates from a proportionately gigantic metal barrel, rusted and knocked on its side and buried in years of vegetative reclamation, with a puddle of foul black liquid dribbling out of the open end. Hikaru and Lala are there too, trying to scoop up Hikaru's pikmin out of the path of a bird-headed snake, snapping its beak at them each time it surfaces from underground, and along with them is another figure you've never seen before.

    Standing on top of a floating metal platform is a one-eyed girl no older than the two Precures, with spiky neon yellow pigtails, purple skin, and multicolored antennae sticking out of her head. She wears a black top and tights with a puffy yellow and magenta skirt, with purple zig-zags all over. She's holding a fucked up and evil-looking black version of the magical pen greeble that Hikaru showed off before, eye upturned in malicious glee and cackling madly. Beside her on the platform is what can only be her butler, a stern-looking cat man in a tailcoated suit, waiting politely for the villaining to be complete.

    "Kyahahaha! Looks like you're, like, totally doomed, *Precures*! You're, like, super duper mega alone now, and once you're taken care of, I'll be to~tally free to grab that Star Drop myself! How's it feel, to be, *lo*sers?!"

    Hikaru glares up at the girl, hugging a pikmin to her chest and squeezing tight enough that its little eyes are bugging out a bit. "You're wrong, Eyewon! We've made new friends with all the cool people that live around this planet! And they're going to help us find Yuma, too!"

    Eyewon thrusts her fists down by her side, sticking her tongue out and scowling so hard her eye is squeezed shut. "Well, I've, like, totally got new friends too, DUH! I've got friends ALL over the place, DUMMY. So how about you come and, like, MEET them!"

    She spins the evil-looking pen around in her hand and points the tip at the bird-snake with a sharp thwap. "Dark pen! Corrupt their stupid heart until it's, like, totally rotted black!"
Merelisa Shaynore     Eyewon draws the pen through the air, blacklight spilling out of the tip to form a floating heart that fills in with vantablack void and smears of distant cosmic color. She twirls around on one foot and then flicks it away, cackling as it fwips onto the bird-snake and swells to envelop it fully before bursting into sickly-green sparkles. The monster KREEEEEs and flails around, and pools of that toxic oily liquid start bubbling out of the ground and climbing up the snakelike neck, growing larger and larger until its new, extra-monstrous form is complete.

    Sapphire serpent scales are replaced with plates of grey metal with toxic oily goo oozing between them, and the bird head on top of the curved snake neck is encased in grey with flat yellow eyes like a mask. Planted right between its eyes is a big purple N, and on its neck right below the beak is a cosmic black heart like the one Eyewon drew. It lunges towards Hikaru with its mouth opened wide enough to swallow her whole, and both of the girls jump back to solid ground.

"Lala!"
"Hikaru!"

    ""Star Color Pendant!""
       ""Color Charge!""

    Both of the girls brandish their pens and plug them into the pendants around their necks like inkwells. When they pull them out, ribbons of light spool out of the tips, drawing a glowing star and heart respectively, then drawing parts of their costume onto themselves that pop! and become real. Ribbons of light snap around Hikaru's wrists and ankles to form bracelets and heels, and then a pink ruffled dress, while Lala dots her pen on her back to pop a big cyan ribbon into existence, and translucent bubbly pads around her shoulders. Sparkles of light turn into earrings, then a line across Lala's head becomes a shooting star headband, and Hikaru draws planetary rings around the ends of her pigtails, matched by a big Saturn pin in her hair. The last touch, drawn up their legs like glowing fabric dragged out of nowhere, are a set of mirrored asymmetrical tights in their signature colors, studded with stars. When their transformations are complete, they hop down and pose next to each other, Hikaru's hand stuck in the air and Lala's forming a heart in front of her chest.

    "The twinkling star that shines throughout the universe, Cure Star!"
    "The Milky Way stretching across the heavens, Cure Milky!"
                    ""Star Twinkle ¤ Precure!""

    When she spots everyone coming out of the treeline, Cure Star leaps up onto a root and points urgently towards the barrel, cupping her other hand around her mouth to amplify it. "Everyone! The X-Ray Detector's inside that barrel there!"

    Meanwhile, Cure Milky holds up the back of her hand and taps on it with a finger-- though there's no glove, or AI, there in her magical girl outfit. "AI calls this a burrowing snagret, lun! Eyewon turned it into a Nottrigger, so it'll be really dangerous until we take care of it! Watch out, because it'll go underground, lun!"
Echolalia Echolalia rushes back to the World of Pikmin, eager to lend a hand and unsure what exactly is going on--but she's grown pretty fond of these two magical kids and it sounds like they might be in trouble!

Echolalia doesn't chase down the route, instead she bwip teleports between trees to speed up her travel time--there's so many of them that it's just a little easier for her that way than just trying to fly around and look for them with all the canopies in the way.

When she arrives and sees Eyewon, her initial thought is, "Oh hey, are you one of the Precures too?" Because she didn't ''read'' Eyewon she heard something like Aiwahn in her head so she doesn't put two and two together.

''*Precures* ... *lo*sers?!''

Oh, Echolalia thinks. Probably not. She pulls herself all the way back out of the tree, dropping down to the floor with the creaking of bark and says, to Hikaru. "You're so sweet..."

But thanks to both genre conventions and being completely unclear on how magical pens work, Echolalia simply tenses up as Eyewon unleashes the power of the Dark Pen! And by the time she understands what's happening, it's too late! This might happen every time actually.

Echolalia darts in towards the birdsnake, throwing a high kick towards its jaw.

"Don't worry, if it goes underground I'll be able to sense it and warn you!" She shouts back.

But first her gaze slants towards the barrel and she eyes it for a moment--but she elects to not worry about that just yet. She has to keep tabs on this Notrigger critter.
Hiromi     While Hisako runs, she's tightening her long sleeves to her sides with red ribbons over each shoulder, matching the knotted strings that hold up her ponytail. She has to put her gauntlets on last. The ornate, white bronze armor looks too large on her small frame, extending up her forearms, though she moves the fingers, testingly, well enough.

    There's no magical girl transformation for her beyond this, though the gauntlets are certainly her magic item. They'd grant her the same feeling of security, even if they weren't.

    Skidding to a stop once she's out of the tree line (giant grass line, actually) she stops to stare at Eyewon -- and her butler. "Who...?"

    And then at the transformation of the snake. "Miasma? It's here, too?!"

    And then at the barrel. "It's huge..."

    Her chance to attack before the snagret goes underground is totally missed, but she probably couldn't have made it, anyway. Hisako advances cautiously, readying herself for a counterattack once it reveals itself. Her feet plant solidly, feeling the ground for vibrations from below.
Combaticon     Depthcharge is already here, having shown up once again to assess Lala and Hikaru's repair work in her absence. So engrossed in this that she hadn't even noticed they took off, much less what direction, and only became aware of it when the radio calls started. She lets out an escalating series of beeps, glancing up the rocket's exterior, "AI."

    The details are provided through high-speed data exchange. Closing her eyes, the 'bot lets out a sigh and passes the information on. She doesn't run or anything-- despite not being an aircraft like Vortex, she literally just flies at a pace only somewhat faster than running on flat ground would be, keeping low to the grass-tops. She periodically checks the holographic map projecting from her wrist, filling out details as she travels-- this might be useful later.

    The robot swings her legs forward and lands atop one of the gnarled roots with a heavy-ish metallic noise, rising to her full height. The scene with the monster assaulting middle schoolers is beheld with an unmistakably vile sneer, the tiny white points that act as pupils in her eyes shifting from the transforming Precures to the empowered snake beast to the colorful alien commanding it.

    "I see," Depthcharge's right hand moves, resting on her steel hip. The engines behind her shoulders shift and adjust their appearance slightly to extend boosters, "These flesh creatures are required for my work." Her left forearm splits open, the hand flipping up and in while a weapon slides out in its place. The barrel extends, nearly touching the ground, while a magnifying scope unfurls. When she raises it, she doesn't bother using the scope in the way a person would.

    "I suppose you'd expect a warning. Unfortunately for you--"

    Depthcharge draws a bead on the edge of Eyewon's floating platform, zeroing in on the mechanisms that keep it in the air. Her right eye narrows. An instant later, she fires a single bolt of glowing purple light.

    "--I don't bother with formalities when regarding nonsapient lifeforms."

    Right after shooting, the robot takes to the air with a burst of thrust from her back-mounted engines.
Futaba Nuki What should have been another relaxing day traipsing about on a strange planet with the Precures is already turning out to be somewhat stressful for Futaba. She drops out of the wormhole already running at full tilt, head and body low to the ground to build speed faster even with one arm in front of her face and the other trailing behind her while somehow not getting tangled up in her scarf. She leaps off the flora when there's too many to properly step over, and she swings from low branches and bounces off roots to to follow the stench towards the last known coordinates of the girls. She doesn't even pause to quip about the scenery, either, and the ninja takes to the air with leathery arm-replacing-wings in preparation to set upon the bird-headed snake until...

She hears someone else there. Someone that's villain monologuing specifically, too, and that's enough to stop her from divebombing the birdsnake for a surprise attack. Instead, Futaba lands on a barrel for a proper ninja-perch as she shakes her arms back into their regular shape, peering down at the cyclops and the butler to see just what they're up to.

"A Corruptioncure, huh...? No, no. Precure, Post... Sick? No, no, there's gotta be something there...." Furrowing her brow as she fails to come up with what Eyewon could be succinctly named, Futaba sighs after failing for a little while longer. As the girls don their Precure forms, she leans back a bit to stay out of eyesight, hastily changing from her usual hoodie and shorts combo into a semi-proper ninja outfit in lighter red and darker purple. Once she's satisfied with that, Futaba stands back up on the barrel, clears her throat, then laughs boisterously to finally announce her presence!

"Need a hand, Precures? Your star-crossedover allies have arrived!" The ninja shouts, clearly not knowing what star-crossed means. Despite that, she leaps off the barrel with a dramatic explosion behind herself, going in an arc right over the transformed snagret. Instead of sailing right over it, however, Futaba does a backwards flip for extra flourish as her tail gains a shiny metallic sheen, then the rest of herself as she turns into a solid steel statue and plummets right at the oily beast.
Natsuki Nuki Having been receiving petitioners for the morning, Natsuki reclined in a dark interior bath, lit in oranges and golds from floor and crevasse lighting. The black tub she sprawled in was filled with fine-bubbled suds, and today seemed finally like a great time to relax and enjoy the simple pleasures of power and wealth. She had made it! Finally, the feeling was settling deeper into her and she could ease off and relax.

And then her flip phone buzzed in a little dry nook besides the pool. Drying hand and rolling in the tub to see the screen, it was Hikaru and Lala's distress that the eldest Nuki sibling spied.

Part of her - loud, ferocious, prideful - knew Futaba might be there, to further show up and frustrate. Another part of her - quieter but no less-present for the volume, pulled her out of the bath far more simply: Hikaru, Lala, and her stupid little red guys were probably in a tight spot.

And Natsuki couldn't just leave her little dipper-nosed dumb plant goons to a fate.

Used to, by now, moving from warpgate directly into fall, a whole rolling stormfront billows dark and heavy from the gate and drizzling sky with the falling swell of a pressure-front falling into the buffering forest.

Moving within-and-as the cloud, Natsuki's thick and awful weather rolls over the massive treetops and vantages over the forest as a swift-creeping darkness, dipping down from vantage over clearing like a waterfall of miserable mist and grey-dark wet air and pouring into a condensing shape that firms in the ground-spilt stormhead.

It's not a humanoid shape. Within the condensing storm, an ink-black shape within grey mist shifts as a shadow's suggestion of a great four legged beast. Broad-stanced from alighting on the ground, the monster in the storm rises up in the shroud and splits it in a roar that peals like thunder, a tight column of crackling electricty bolting out across the Nottrigger's lunging attack at the transforming Precures, half ''warning'' and half very real counter-promise of violence.

The storm condenses further, four-legged beast shadow-shifting down to the two legged Osakan yokai. Stepping from the storm pointing with a finger at Eyewon, Natsuki's mad-quirked brow is the picture of personally incensed. "Hey, hey, HEY! Why don't you hop on home, Kasa-obaka!" Natsuki shouts. "If this is a battle of friends you'd best be ready to lose!"
Rita Ma      Hearing AI's tone is enough to put taut urgency in Rita. Nobody- at least, nobody who hasn't seen worse- needs to see the way she zips through the forest. Grass bends in the breeze, dust puffs, bark fragments at kickoff hard-corners, but the culprit is already out-of-frame.

     'Cure Glow', with her star pendant, arrives on the scene. "Lala! Hikaru!!" she calls down from the top of the incline Oh thank goodness, they're not hurt mixes with what kind of person would attack them like this?! to put a queasily tense look on her face as she slide-jumps down.

     Well, it's 'only' fighting a giant monster and/or a dark rivalgirl, something that has never KOed the heroines in episode two ever. Surely Rita can handle that. "Don't worry, Cure Glow and Cure Milky! I'll--"

     She looks at their pens, and at their incredibly fancy costumes, and remembers those highly personalized and very magical transformation sequences, and covers her mouth to dry-swallow. Oh gosh. Oh no. She doesn't have an outfit design and she's going to be found out as a fraud and she has to come up with one right now and--

     No, wait. She has been watching some shows, for research. Emotionally sincere pleas are magical girl stuff too.

     "How can you feel happy about bullying them?" Rita calls up, after whipcrack-throwing an ambient pikmin (poor guy) at Eyewon's Evil Pen. "I know you want to steal Yuma, but look at them! Kind Hikaru and hard-working Lala are the sweetest magical girls I've ever met! What feels good about calling someone who's doing their best for a friend a 'loser'?"

     It comes from the heart, but that's not a tone she's good at taking!
Sarracenia      Sarra has yet to be eaten by a bird, so she is once again flying (with her raccoon ears and tail this time) and once again in her vibrant red jress. Is it shinier than last time? Well, whether or not it is the shimmering scarlet red contrasts well with the golden embroidery as she flies toward the coordinates. Of course, she does not fly too high. Never fly above the canopy.

     She arrives in time to hear the evil magical girl talking and see the transformation. Sarra has mixed feeling about transformative goo. On the one hand, she has this awesome silver morphmetal stuff now. On the other...Melting Love. It is clear this is a bad snakebird when it tries to eat the Precures.

     And since she is flying, she does a loop before diving down to gain speed, then spinning to stand on her hammer head. She rides it down, aiming for the head of that nasty snake thing and creating a shockwave when she lands before backflipping to try and get clear of any counter-attacks.

     "This thing is hardly what I would call a friend." she says to Eyewon, frowning lightly. "And I highly doubt that a dark magical girl like you has true friends. That could perhaps change though if you did not do things like this. I am sure you would like some real friends, right?"
Lilian Rook     The first thing Lilian thinks of is wondering how Inspector Unit One got involved in any of this. The second thing she thinks of is that horrid bulborb creature, and the idea of Hikaru and Lala being attacked by literally anything in that forest bothers her enough to drop what she's doing and ready herself at emergency speed.

    The third is a sort of dread unease that is at once completely unfamiliar yet entirely distinct from anything similar. The giant forest and its bizarre megafauna had been one thing, but,

    §That's an oil drum. It's not just some giant container, but a man-made, twenty-first century oil drum, from Earth. Who made it?§

    The villain of the week is significantly less chilling. The fact that she happens to be a rival of Hikaru and Lala is reassuring; those two will know what to do, and haven't been done in by her so far. More than that, she's tangible, present, and a funny little alien that Lilian can see. There's nothing suspenseful about it; a fight is a fight is a fight. The wild animal is a higher priority target, given its ambush ability and utter lack of willingness to engage in dramatic dialogue.

    Silently, Lilian wonders if the 'dark pen' would work for anyone else.

    'Eyewon turned it into a Nottrigger'

    "A what?!" Lilian yells loud enough to start coughing. It totally breaks her wandering concentration. Now she has to think about how she can fight a funny alien meangirl in a way that won't just traumatize Hikaru and Lala (despite the best efforts of others).

    'Everyone! The X-Ray Detector's inside that barrel there!'

    No, that makes it fairly easy. All Lilian has to do is summon up a swarm of orbiting glow-lights and antigravity fly-hop into the dark depths of the tipped over drum looking for it. She'll figure out how to grab anything later.
Merelisa Shaynore "Who...?"
"Need a hand, Precures? Your star-crossedover allies have arrived!"

    "Kyahahaha! *These* are your new friends? They look, like, totally pathetic. Maybe I'll use one of them for my next Nottrigger...~" Eyewon spins the dark pen around in her hand smugly, her floating platform circling around the clearing high above the burrowing snagret's head.

"These flesh creatures are required for my work."

    She's teasingly pointing it at Hisako when Depthcharge's beam hits her platform, and the explosion knocks her staggering around with the pen juggling between her hands. She grabs hold of it again and glares down at the Decepticon, forehead scrunched up in annoyance.

    "Hey, hey! What's the big idea here, dummy?! Are you some kind of, like, battle robot?" The pen thwips around between two of her fingers, aimed at Depthcharge like a teacher's pointer. The snagret lunges to follow it, dipping beneath the ground and then resurfacing right next to Depthcharge, beak snapping down around her head. "Go, like, GET her, Nottrigger! I'll make some totally crazy new weapon in my lab with her!"

    "--And I'm, like, totally sapient! I'm super duper smart, *i*diot!"

    While she's fuming and stomping her feet, her butler steps up behind her and puts a hand on her shoulder, talking calmly despite the battle. "Lady Eyewon is the premier scientist of the Nottraiders, and one of Lady Mujinko's personal advisors. Her intelligence should not be underestimated."

    "That's right! Yeah! Bakenyan's right, my intelligence *totally* shouldn't be underestimated!"

    Meanwhile on the ground, Hikaru takes a moment to stare at everyone coming to her defense, squeezing the pikmin tighter to her chest. Eyes sparkling, sounding overwhelmed, "Everyone... you're all here...." and Lala has to shout to get her attention when the snagret lowers its face to the ground and slithers, cutting a high speed line through the oil to charge at her. "Star--!!"

    Hikaru jumps out of the way, boots clicking against a magical star that pops into the air for her to double jump off of, leaping over the snagret and smashing her fist down onto its head. "Staaaar puuuuuuuuuuunch!!"

    Even with the jarring impact and the spray of stars that erupts from its head, its charge isn't deterred, bowling through Futaba, Echo, and Hisako. Natsuki's rain drenches the clearing and the mud slows down its serpentine movements, but the bolt of lightning glances off its metal scales with just a scorch mark left behind. After Sarra, Echo, and Futaba bonk it in the head together, it KREEEEs again and dives back underground, mud slopping together to smooth out the crater it left.

"And I highly doubt that a dark magical girl like you has true friends."

    Eyewon makes a nyehhhh sound at Sarracenia. "Don't make me GAG. I'm not something DUMB like a Precure. I'm, like, WAY cooler and better."
Merelisa Shaynore "What feels good about calling someone who's doing their best for a friend a 'loser'?"

    "Because she's doing her best for a *loser*, loser! You're, like, *all* totally just losers, so your *best* is always just going to be *loser-best*, and I'm a *winner* so my best is, like, *better*! And besides, I can totally rely on my friends for *anything*, because they can't ever fail me, but *you*--"

    Just then, the launched pikmin collides with the pen that Eyewon is gesturing around with at missile-speed. It paffs into a red mist like a bird being hit by a baseball, if bird and baseball were one and the same, and the dark pen is flung spinning through the air out of her hand. A ghostly little spirit of a pikmin continues the launch trajectory, wobbling up to heaven past the pen while Eyewon fumbles for a handheld tractor beam laser and hastily beams it.

    "Huhh???? Like, what the heck was with that?! You totally threw that little guy at mach five right at my face! Rude rude rude rude rude--!"

    Bakenyan steps up behind her again and lightly bows, while Eyewon drags the dark pen through the air back into her hand. "They're quite strong, my lady. Perhaps we should back off and let the Nottrigger finish the job."

    "Nooooouuuu! I don't want the Precures to see me, like, *running scared* of their dumb little *friends*!" "... As you wish, my lady."

    Hikaru clenches her fists encouragingly at Rita, supersized pigtails bouncing around and faintly glowing in the gloom. "Glow!! That's a really good idea! I'll throw them too, but, less hard!"

    She bounds up onto a translucent star platform, puts two fingers in her mouth, and fweeeeees for all the pikmin to stumble through the mud towards her. She scoops up and armload, and starts chucking them at the burrowing snagret's head, while Lala looks aghast.

"But it *exploded*, lun!"
"But we have to keep our friends safe!"
"But... aren't they friends, lun...?"

"A what?!"

    Lala zips through the air to Lilian, antennae held up and glowing with teal electric energy to light the cavernous inside of the barrel. The fumes are suffocating, and the path to the yellow and blue gleepoid-antenna device is blocked by some form of those mandibled beetles that have adapted for the gunk.

    "It's a big monster that she turns people into by corrupting their hearts, lun," as if that makes complete sense. "All of the Nottraider leaders have something like that.... I don't know why they hate people being happy so much, lun."

    Outside the barrel, Hikaru's plan worked well, right up until the snagret starts shaking. A shiver shoots up its serpentine neck, and splatters of corrosive oily goo spray all over everyone around, making Hikaru shield her little red dumbo army with her body. The snagret flicks its head while she's distracted, and flings the pikmin off, and its beak lunges and snaps up some out of the air, swallowing them like popcorn before vanishing back underground.

    "Ahh--! It ate them!"
Combaticon     Depthcharge hasn't gotten too far off the ground before the mutated Snagret surfaces behind her. In a scene not at all unlike that of a certain television show, her head and upper shoulders are engulfed by that bird-like beak in a shower of sparks and glowing pink liquid Energon. When it releases her to go elsewhere in the battlefield, she drops to her feet-- headless-- but stays standing.

> "Lady Eyewon is the premier scientist of the Nottraiders, and one of Lady Mujinko's personal advisors. Her intelligence should not be underestimated."

    "The explanation is appreciated, Expositron."

    There's a distinct mechanical ratcheting noise as her torso splits slightly and her head emerges, scarred but still recognizable.

    "I am not a 'battle robot', either," The engines on her back ignite, carrying the robot aloft. She still has the null ray equipped, though sweeps it down and out of the way for a moment, "I am a Decepticon, and a scientist myself."

    While flying, Depthcharge's shins split open, panels sliding back. She coasts in a lazy S-curve, dropping can-shaped explosives in pairs off either side. If she can blast out the sludge or ignite it, the serpent's ability to use it to move will (in theory) be severely hampered. The fact that organics might not appreciate all the fire doesn't really cross her mind.

    With her charges deployed, Depthcharge shifts her posture in midair and brings up her laser again. Her target zooms in through the reticule and, without hesitation, she fires another bolt of bright purple laser-- at Eyewon's dark pen. Intending on knocking it right out of her hands, now that she's demonstrated just how important it is.

    "As a fellow 'being of science', you will not mind if I examine *this* for myself."
Echolalia Triple bonk!

Echolalia learns that Eyewon is not just, like, totally sapient but is also totally smart! Echolalia is uneasy about throwing hands at someone who looks like they are thirteen, though, even if they are a super smart teenager.

Echolalia backflips away from the charge, sticking her tongue out with a "PHHHHBT!" She taunts and as she lands in a handspring she says proudly, "Ha ha ha! Nice try, buddy!!"

She twists herself around by adjusting her hand placement and looks back to the creature.

''Nooooouuuuu! I don't want the Precures to see me, like, *running scared* of their dumb little *friends*!''

"Haha!! You'll be running scared of their dumb little friends soon!" Then she immediately feels bad because she realizes she's not exactly fond of teasing teenagers either. "Sorry I just kind of automatically reacted here--but we ''are'' pretty tough we can like turn around if you want--"

The snagret ducked down underground! "Aw shoot...!"

She continues to backpedal a bit, closing her eyes to track down the creature before--

--gesturing with both her hands, pushing apart in either direction--and opening up the earth to try and disrupt its sneaky underground maneuvering--and open up sightlines on the creature.

"Hey if this creature is just--like turned into this, is it possible to--like--undo that?"
Sarracenia      'Don't make me GAG. I'm not something DUMB like a Precure. I'm, like, WAY cooler and better.'

     The fact that this girl has a butler who is working to keep her calm...well, it draws an uncomfortable parallel for Sarra. She is fairly certain she was never this bratty and insulting.

     ...pretty certain.

     ...kinda certain...

     "...oh my...did I sound like that at some point...?" she says without thinking about who might hear her. "...is that guy basically Gregory...?"

     Sarra shakes her head to clear that terrible thought, then huffs! "You cannot corrupt any of our hearts!" she exclaims despite probably being vulnerable herself. "And you are the one who-..." Wait, she can't say anything about needing a butler around. "...look pathetic, needing others to fight your battles for you! Are you so weak that you have to stay up there? And if you do have intelligence, perhaps learn how to talk!"

     'Because she's doing her best for a *loser*, loser! You're, like, *all* totally just losers, so your *best* is always just going to be *loser-best*, and I'm a *winner* so my best is, like, *better*!'

     "So, how much of a loser do you become when you lose to us?" Sarra says back. She has absolutely no problem arguing with and insulting annoying teenage dark magical girls. So perhaps it is karmic retribution that...SPLOP! The princess is completely covered in that dreadful oily goo. She stands there a few moments before her eyes blink open, the only non-black on her body now.

     <J-IC-Scene> Combaticon says, "All units, avoid the black sludge. There is a solid probability it will ignite any moment."

     The princess's expression goes flat even with only her eyes visible. "...right..." she mutters as she starts to flick goo off as best she can, only to start yelping as it starts to burn like acid. The threat of burning with fire is also apparently a risk and Sarra has no idea how she is going to get this stuff off of her. So, she decides her best chance is to just fly up again.

     She pulls out a cloud and hops on, then pulls out a few bob-ombs. "They may not be Pikmin, but these are perhaps even better for throwing!" she shouts before lobbing a few at both the snake and the magical girl.
Hiromi     She's teasingly pointing it at Hisako when...

    Danger! Extreme and unknown danger! Hisako shivers in spite of her determination, imagining what the corrupting influence of this outworlder could do to her.

    Looking at what happened to the bird-snake, "Worse than oni... are nottrigger-raiders like 'devils'...?" That sounded like a loanword, and the word shortly before it sounded like she's having trouble keeping up.

    'Everyone... you're all here....'

    "Hikaru!" Even new friends are glad sights, and Hisako is still processing the idea that they're younger than her. Should she be protecting them...?

    'Staaaar puuuuuuuuuuunch!!'

    An impressed "Ohh!" is interrupted by the sight of the snagret not having been at all deterred. Hisako's stance widens and lowers, bent at the knees with one hand held back behind her, the other raised in front. An incoming beast far larger than her is a problem, and scary, but a frontal charge is more reassuring than an ambush from below. Her weight shifts back just a moment before, then down and forward into the moment of impact. Her guarding arm sweeps away the beak, striking with inertia as if her gauntlets were unimaginably dense even as the impact drives her back, feet kicking up dust, to create a target for her prepared rising uppercut, into which she twists a half-circle before leaping.

    Following up without waiting to see how that blow was taken, Hisako gets a few stomps and much lighter blows to the metal-clad bird's head before she has to leap far away -- but not far enough that she can entirely avoid the sludge. The lack of solid footing is a real and increasingly present danger to her fighting style, on top of the sludge being gross, unsanitary, and evil. (Those last two are kinda-sorta the same thing.)

    'Because she's doing her best for a *loser*, loser! You're, like, *all* totally just losers, so your *best* is always just going to be *loser-best*, and I'm a *winner* so my best is, like, *better*!'

    "That's really mean..." says the girl whose ears are flattening as she tries to find a position from which to leap at Eyewon. Her tail is low and still. Her eyes, past her raised guard, are narrowed.

    '... As you wish, my lady.

    She may not know what a butler is, but Hisako knows about bodyguards. With that stance... maybe he's well-trained? The observant type. She can't overlook him.

    Keeping off the nottriggered snagret's path, Hisako leaps for Bakenyan. If she can get a grip on those coattails, she can swing him around and to the ground to separate the two.
Futaba Nuki Seeing Natsuki's cloud coming in from above lights a greater fire in Futaba's heart than even the threat of danger to the girls and the arrival of a new Dark Not-Precure. With the changing weather bringing whipping winds, her scarf gets to look even cooler!  "A battle of friends, huh? Man, that's kind of unfair if we're counting all the little guys!"

Somehow, she's saying all that even while falling as a big statue.

"They look, like, totally pathetic. Maybe I'll use one of them for my next Nottrigger...~"
"The next what? Is that what that guy's all about?" Futaba asks in mid-descent, projecting her voice as easily as ever as she drops. The collision with the snagret is satisfying enough, but she's caught off guard when it just rushes right towards her and slams right back into her. The steel tanuki goes flying back through the air quite a bit, and she transforms her arms into large spikes to slow herself down as she skids along the ground following that impact.

"That smarts... Oh? Of course we're here, Hikaru! Lala! No way we'd leave you kids alone to deal with..." Standing back up, she gestures a spiked arm at both Eyewon and the snagret, then all over at the rest of the surrounding area. "Giant animals, giant plants, giant... Barrel."

Looking at it a little closer, the oil and the barrel do feel somewhat out of place. She peers at it a little longer, then turns right back over to Eyewon as she continues throwing her taunts at the group. Futaba actually furrows her brow for a moment, too, then actually makes a noise when she sees the red puff.

"Did.. What?" It takes her a few second to process the ghostly pikmin, then strokes her chin as she looks at the pen and at Rita. "Huh. Didn't think about using 'em that way." She murmurs, then shakes her head and reaches into her pouch. "Nah. Even if they come outta the ground, they're still our weak lil buds. So..."

She brings out her katana, and it bursts into flames. "Let's get in there and show this Nottrigger Summoner and her... Uh. Dad?" She's not sure what Bakenyan is, but she does give him a look like she's expecting him to answer.

She also transforms shades glasses onto her face just so she can nudge them down a little to give him a slight eyebrow waggle.

"... Let's show 'em the power of our new bonds!" Futaba declares and starts running ahead to get back into the fight, slowing down a bit when she see reminds herself that she's fighting for and against basically children.

She looks at her flaming sword, she looks at the oil, and she quickly disperses the flames before pulling the katana's sheath out of that same pouch. After sheathing the blade and wrapping it up in some fancy-looking ribbons, she finally leaps forward at the snagret, flipping an excessive number of times to build momentum and speed so she can slam the pommel down at it with both hands!

Coincidentally, her hands have become gorilla-sized, and the pommel is just barely peeking out from under her hammer blow.
Natsuki Nuki "Oh, you must think I'm wearing silver and red and blocking my beam attack is scary or something." Natsuki scoffs, arms spread as she takes stock of the massive Snagret. Natsuki is no stranger to magics that make the monster grow - as a monster grown by magics, it's the lingering transformation that she takes in as a wide-eyed young academic for a moment through her veneer of cool.

With the same eager-flicking taking-in of an engaged afficianado finding a particularly awesome lizard or beetle in the wild, it's that pulsing corrupted heart that draws the final and most realized positive attention.

"Caused by that pen of a wand, huh?" Natsuki asks, her occult appreciator gaze moving from reared and attacking Snagret to Eyewon's wand-holding hand.

Where a missile-speed Pikmin crashes into the wand, and with a paff, rises to little plant guy Heaven. Beyond shocked, as her eyes follow pen-wand out of Eyewon's hand, and up, to the little soul of the plant buddy fading away, Natsuki stammers out a genuinely uncool--"H-huh?" And then a gasped. "--Wait!!"

She calls for the little soul fading away, and reaches a hand up. The soul disappears, and Natsuki's fingers curl back into a fist and sweep down to her side, ankle deep in dark muck.

'Nooooouuuu! I don't want the Precures to see me, like, *running scared* of their dumb little *friends*!'

"You should listen to your minder, girl." Natsuki growls. "They're trying to help you."

It's not very threatening when Natsuki bounds forward in the muck and is caught in the rise of the Snagret bursting from the muck and casting corrupted oils around. Disappearing into goop for several measures, a determined through sliming Natsuki reappears clawing her way up the Snagret's neck, swinging right through the goop unhindered. As she reaches the head and neck, Natsuki clings with a leg-lock and joins the cardinal Pikmin in beating her thunder-crackling fists with Hikaru's little guys -- because she's not capable of actively telling the difference while emotionally overcome. They're all her little guys!

"Cough those OUT!!" Natsuki screams, arms extending into a noose-tie around the Snagret's thick neck and heaving down to heimlich-approximate the bird, regardless of the goopy causticity of the oil or the onrushing ground. Right now the only thing that's on her mind isn't even her vendetta with Futaba.

Right now she's just thinking about red little guys.
Lilian Rook     'Kyahahaha! *These* are your new friends? They look, like, totally pathetic.'

    "Well . . ."

    Lilian looks back to the crowd, and chooses to say nothing.

    'Nooooouuuu! I don't want the Precures to see me, like, *running scared* of their dumb little *friends*!'
    'I don't know why they hate people being happy so much, lun.'

    §I get it. Do your best, Eyewon.§

    Unfortunately, Lilian is not particularly immune to fumes. She hasn't thought it particularly worthwhile to get cybernetic lungs or spend years studying healing magic instead. The eye-watering acidity and dizzying stench assault her before she can get far enough to matter, sending her staggering back with her arm over her face, hacking and coughing too badly to even breathe, never mind--

    '...oh my...did I sound like that at some point...?'

    "Literally all the time!" Lilian shouts, with most of her remaining oxygen, forcing her to back out further to breathe. Coughing up her last lungful of horrid fumes, Lilian croaks "Lala, look away for a second." before unholstering Winter Crow and unloading half an amalgam stack into the beetles along a right-left sweep of--

    §Oh my fucking god even my gun has the same colour-coded magic circles and vents glittery star-stuff. I have a theme and they're never going to believe me.§

    Dealing with the gribbly beetles, Lilian reaches for her Tactical Runestone Holster, planning out her path via the handful of winter shapings she has-- then spots in the incoming explosives, gracefully tumbling through the air, primed to set the whole area on fire, completely bar her way, and possibly melt the x-ray module to slag inside the oil barrel.

    Several neatly bisected canisters splash into the oil and sink below. Lilian can yell about it later. For now, she's busy using her ~~absolute cold of space~~ druidic spellcraft to freeze over as much of the barrel-interior sludge that she can, opting for a surface layer rather than a solid bridge. A final tossed runestone ignites the gas fumes themselves, creating a short-lived but dramatic deflagration; one that will certainly melt the ice shield, then burn off before the oil itself can defrost and catch fire.
Merelisa Shaynore "The explanation is appreciated, Expositron."

    Bakenyan's tail fwips back and forth, though he doesn't respond. It looks a little bit like he found the joke funny, but his professional poker face is quite good.

"As a fellow 'being of science', you will not mind if I examine *this* for myself."

    "Uh--?! Yes I freaking *will* mind?!" Eyewon ducks down on the platform, narrowly avoiding getting fried with her pen clutched to her chest, and falls and faceplants. While she tries to scramble to her feet, the platform rocks with its damaged jets, and she yelps and clings to it on all fours.

    "As, like, a fellow scientist, you can buzz right off!"

"You cannot corrupt any of our hearts!"

    Eyewon crawls around on the platform to slide open a secret panel and slam a button, causing a pair of fighter jet-like laser prongs to slide out of the front of it. The platform swoops around, and fires back at Depthcharge, harrying her to stop shooting at Eyewon herself so that she can actually stand back up without getting shot.

    And then, immediately, with a curl of smoke coming out of one of her pigtails, get back to Posting. "I can soooo corrupt you, dummy! Like, literally everyone's corruptable, because eeeeveryone's got evil in their stupid hearts no matter how much they LIE otherwise! There's, like, no such thing as a pure heart, you stupid dumb liar!"

    Hikaru wipes a palmful of oil off of her face so that her hot pink eyes can glare through defiantly up at Eyewon. "That's not true! There's nothing you could do that'd make me betray Lala! Or my other friends! My wish to protect them's too strong for that!"

    "Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrgh, you're soooooo annoyyyyyyyyying! That's just, like, because of your *stupid* pendant, STUPID."

"Let's get in there and show this Nottrigger Summoner and her... Uh. Dad?"
"You should listen to your minder, girl."

    Bakenyan starts to object with a much less formal tone than usual, voice almost cracking with how forcefully he insists, "I'm not her *dad*--" Then he clears his throat and sounds normal again. "And neither am I Lady Eyewon's minder. I am but her humble servant, advising for what I perceive as her well-being, though her intuition outstrips my own, of course."

    Despite all the attacks aimed at Eyewon, neither of them are expecting anything like Hisako's leap at Bakenyan. "H-hey--!"

    He staggers back from the extra weight on his coattails, almost being pulled off the platform, but he digs his shoes into the metal with surprising strength and resists Hisako's yank long enough to plant a elbow strike back into her chest, and drive a heel sideways to dislodge her arm, all without unbalancing the tray of mysterious cloches he's carrying. Hisako's assumption about a trained bodyguard feels like it's not too far off at all, considering the flash of martial capability he showed there.
Merelisa Shaynore "Haha!! You'll be running scared of their dumb little friends soon!"
"They're trying to help you."

    After having Bakenyan almost command-grabbed right off the platform she's on, Eyewon has returned to flattening herself like a worm and peeking derisively over the side, with the pen squished between her and the metal. She looks about as condescending as she can, while being in duck-and-cover position, and sticks her tongue out brattily.

    "Nyyyyyyo! I, like, won't ever be scared of *losers* like you! It's totally unfair you brought an army! I, like, got separated from the other Nottraiders, and it's not fair that *you* get to find allllll these new people who'll totally just start fighting for you, while all *I* ever get is, like, Bakenyan, and Lady Mujinko, and the Nottraiders! It's *not* fair, and if I leave, it'll, like, just be *evening the scales*!"

    Bakenyan, out of view of Eyewon while politely standing behind her, rubs his face with his hand, exhaustedly. "Lady Eyewon, if I might suggest... again...."

"Cough those OUT!!"

    Hikaru gasps and skids through the mud to Natsuki's side, standing at the base of the snagret's long neck. "Miss Nue!! You think we can save them?! I'll help!!"

    Hikaru winds up another punch, this one aimed at the 'belly' (or at least, the base of the presumed esophagus) of the snagret. A magical star appears on her fist, and with a determined 'hhhhaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAA' she slams the monster at the same time that Natsuki squeezes it, causing it to choke up several slimy pikmin and a cluster of wispy ghosts. Hikaru catches the bug-eyed goobers in her arms, and then shrieks and tosses them into the pile with the others.

    To escape them, the Nottrigger slips back underground, causing a brief whirlpool of mud that threatens to suck Hikaru, Natsuki, and anyone else near it down under. Tracking its vibrations through the ground is hard with the mud and slime around, but it's big enough that Echolalia can still get close and tear open a chasm in which its long slithery body can be seen peeking through. It's moving fast, springing from one open side to the other, but Futaba can still jump down into the chasm and whack it across the neck before the chasm closes up.

"Hey if this creature is just--like turned into this, is it possible to--like--undo that?"

    "Yeah! Milky and I just need to get a good chance to!" Hikaru looks around the Nottrigger-less field, while it's evading them underwater, and sighs in frustration. "But how...? It's too slippery!"

    Just then, a rumbling in the ground below Natsuki's own little guys is the only signal before the embiggened snagret erupts again, beak trying to close around them. After pulling herself out of the muck she was thrown backwards into, Hikaru exclaims, "Oh!!! It *wants* to eat them!"
Merelisa Shaynore "Lala, look away for a second."

    "Lun--!" And she does! Isn't that a miracle?

    The oil isn't so deep that Lilian has to wade through it; even at this wildly expanded scale, the deepest point in the barrel is just mid-calf. So when the momentary fireball vanishes and the fumes are slowly seeping back up from the ground, she and Lala can both cross the looooong dark chasm, lit just by the glow of Lala's antennae, to get to the X-ray Detector at the back. It's sitting on a small dry knob of warped and rusty metal, enough to constitute an island, and Lala stops next to it and leans over, hands on her knees.

    "Peh, peh, bleh... oyo... we can breathe in space as Precures, but this gunk is still so gross-smelling, lun. AI, what *is* this stuff?"

    There's no response, since the device vanished in Lala's transformation, but Lala is already queueing up a second query before that registers in her mind, looking sideways at the big gizmo. "AI, can you calculate how much weight Lilian and I could-- oh, lun."

    She looks briefly uncertain and even distraught, like a pillar of her world just vanished and left her unsteady, and there's an embarrassed glance up at Lilian. Then her expression hardens in determination, and her antennae spark with teal lightning. "Lun! We'll just do it together! Miiiilky Shield!"

    Lala puffs up her cheeks and clenches her fist like she's trying to give herself a terrible headache on purpose, and a heart-shaped wall of magical electricity lights up between her antennae. She guides it underneath the X-Ray Detector as a platform, then grips one side of it to try and heave it up and out of the barrel.
Combaticon     Right as her laser blaster hits, Depthcharge's explosives should explode.

    They don't.

    Perhaps, she reasons, the sludge has caused some sort of delay.

    Still nothing.

    She shoots a look down with a scowl, "*Excuse* me, there was supposed to be a forest-encompassing *fireball.*" but she sees nothing. The wreckage has already sunk out of sight. The white points in her eyes snap back up towards Eyewon and her damaged platform, following its erratic motions with Hisako and Bakenyan duking it out and messing with the stability.

    "Interesting."

    Well, if the oil isn't going to explode and catch fire, she might as well make use of it in another way. The Decepticon retracts her laser rifle back into her arm and twists at the waist. All of her limbs and her torso split open and reconfigure, letting out that ratcheting mechanical noise as she transforms and grows in size. The new shape-- a high speed attack boat-- drops out of the air at an angle, hits the oil, and immediately accelerates while kicking up an awful rooster tail of polluted muck.

    "Show me more of what you can do!"

> ""Oh!!! It *wants* to eat them!"

    "We can use that--" The Decepticon boat swerves suddenly, throwing up a huge wave of black, polluted mud under a hail of lasers. She hauls herself in circles, sending out concentric waves, until she picks a direction and speeds off right back towards the monsterized birdsnake,"You can always fabricate more. Back away!"

    Her targeting system, currently unable to fixate the snagret itself when it burrows, instead locks onto a cluster of rescued Pikmin. A pair of launchers extend upward from the gunwales of her boat mode. Some calculations run through her processor-- she hesitates intentionally-- and then fires two missiles, one right after the other, in high arcs.

    That mechanical noise echoes out from her body as the attack boat splits open and then compresses. With a forward flip, Depthcharge returns to her robot mode and ascends, shielding her eyes to follow the missiles. If her calculations are correct-- and she has no reason to think otherwise-- that should put both shots directly into the Snagret's mouth.
Sarracenia      'Literally all the time!'

     Sarra's expression once again goes flat and she lets out an annoyed 'mmmph'. "I did not! ...not -all- the time!" she protests weakly.

     'I am but her humble servant, advising for what I perceive as her well-being, though her intuition outstrips my own, of course.'

     "I have a butler a lot like you!" Sarra calls out to Bakenyan. "And if you are anything like him, I hope you will at least tell your mistress when she is doing something bad, even if it is behind closed doors later! If you care about her like you say, then you will be helping her by doing that!" Is the evil magical girl's butler also evil? Or is he just loyal? Sarra intends to test that!

     'Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrgh, you're soooooo annoyyyyyyyyying! That's just, like, because of your *stupid* pendant, STUPID.'

     "Okay, I was never this annoying!" Sarra exclaims...even though she may have said things very similar to that before, if with less mean valley girl vibes. She pauses a moment, then hees. "Oooh. I see. You are jealous of the Precures! With their friends and their pretty outfits and cute ship! While all you have is a butler! No wonder you are so mean to them and everyone else!"

     Sarra is too busy posting back (small P since she isn't that good at it) to avoid the incoming chomp. Sarra is knocked upward by the breach!

     'But how...? It's too slippery!'

     "So, you like to eat things? Well, here! Chew on these!" As Sarra comes down again she pulls out an ice flower, and in a puff of smoke she is in an icy color palette. She pulls out some bob-ombs after, and each one gains a coating of ice power before she throws it, creating freezing bombs! Combined with the oil that should make it a lot harder to move for the creature!
Lilian Rook     'Like, literally everyone's corruptable, because eeeeveryone's got evil in their stupid hearts no matter how much they LIE otherwise! There's, like, no such thing as a pure heart, you stupid dumb liar!'

    God help her. Lilian wants to say it with her whole chest. This horrid little teenager is totally right and the only reason she isn't saying so is because it'd directly contracit Hikaru's belief in absolute true friendship and love, which would hurt her moderately worse than keeping her mouth shut.

    'Nyyyyyyo! I, like, won't ever be scared of *losers* like you! It's totally unfair you brought an army! I, like, got separated from the other Nottraiders, and it's not fair that *you* get to find allllll these new people who'll totally just start fighting for you, while all *I* ever get is, like, Bakenyan, and Lady Mujinko, and the Nottraiders!'

    Noooooo come onnnnnnnnnnnnn don't do that!!!

    "It is totally unfair. That's just how it is. And it's never going to change." Lilian says, unable to stop herself. Half-heartedly squash it down makes her throat tight, but the words are surprisingly bouyant. "But complaining about it won't get you anywhere! It's hard, and it's lonely, and it sucks that only you have to do it, but the only thing you can do is become someone who can overcome that unfairness! Instead of relying on others who aren't there for you, work on yourself and trust in your own two hands! I know you can do it one day!"

    Well, hopefully not to Hikaru or Lala. But to some other shitters somewhere else. The idea of Eyewon defeating some annoying heroes Lilian doesn't like gives her a sliver of the same feeling she has towards Lala, some way, somehow.

    Thank god the gunk isn't arbitrarily caustic.

    'AI, what *is* this stuff?'

    "It's oil. Probably crude. It's flammable, and poisonous if you ingest it, but not inherently harmful." Lilian says, answering in lieu of the AI, vaguely sensing that it's important to Lala in an ambiguous way that someone do so.

    'AI, can you calculate how much weight Lilian and I could-- oh, lun.'

    "We'll be fine. I'm stronger than I look, you know." Lilian says. "A black hole is the heaviest thing there is; Something like this is easy compared to the fabric of space!" Unfortunately, Lilian is now leaning into it. Fortunately, that is mostly true.

    'Lun! We'll just do it together! Miiiilky Shield!'

    "Fantastic work, Cure Milky. That should make this much easier." Lilian naturally lapses into the Magical Girl name for Reasons. The power she sends coursing through her limbs to redouble their strength manifests as tiny rivulets of redshifted light running through the miniscule seams in her convoluted black armour, shrouding the surface in the faint lensing effect of displaced temporal action. Then she digs her fingers into the other side of the x-ray module as hard as she can without bending anything too severely, and hauls it upright with strength of at least like twenty or fifty pikmin!

    The work of hauling it out requires her to set a beat with Lala, but she takes the lead, putting her back to the opening of the oil drum so that she's in the way of any potential attack.

    '*Excuse* me, there was supposed to be a forest-encompassing *fireball.*'

    "Why? We're in the forest!" Lilian huff-yells over the effort of carrying away a giant metal object.

    'So, you like to eat things?'

    "Do you want to try that again?" She even cranes her neck to try and stare incredulously at Sarracenia. "That was a dud even for you."
Echolalia ''I'm not her *dad*''

Echolalia glances at the butler. Those words coming out of a butler's mouth feels strange to her but she supposes she doesn't know any real butlers, only--like--media butlers. She'd probably be more comfortable kung fu battling a butler over a teen genius but fortunately there's a Notrigger to deal with. It's had to be too menaced by someone who is throwing this kind of tantrum and she probably shouldn't root for her but she can't help but find it weirdly endearing. Then again, she is only having to deal with this for one day rather than a multi-battle conflict.

Through a tremendous act of willpower, she manages to not stick her tongue out at Eyewon and--

--oh no wait, she's actually totally sticking her tongue back out at her. Guess she didn't have quite enough willpower.

She can't argue that it isn't really fair though, "WAit do you want us to help you find your friends?" This has been offered already, but she is asking again anyway.

And then she is swooooped away by the mudwhirlpool while she was distracted! "Accckk!!!" She yells, using her terrestrial control to pry herself free from the gunk and onto drier land, but now she's all sogged up with mud across her legs and is having trouble moving with her usual lightfootedness.

''Yeah! Milky and I just need to get a good chance to!''

"Alright I'll try to.---ack shoot!!" It's already emerged again!

But this time she can summon a tangle of vines, trying to entrap the creature between an everexpanding brush of foliage and topiary to try and disrupt it's ability to pop back down...!
Futaba Nuki "I'm not her *dad*--"
Futaba narrows her eyes slightly at Bakenyan's voice crack, slowly cracking a grin across her face even while she's in the middle of pounding her gorilla fists into the snagret. "... Heh. Well, you're doing alright! Keep it up, big guy." She raises a fist smoothly in approval, then resumes her punching of the Nottrigger after hearing Natsuki's surprising scream at the transformed creature. She adjusts her aim to its neck as well, but something else catches her attention beyond all the mismatched violence going around.

"It's totally unfair you brought an army!"
"all *I* ever get is, like, Bakenyan, and Lady Mujinko, and the Nottraiders!"
"Eyewon..." Futaba actually lets up in her attacks for a moment, giving her a somewhat sympathetic look as she considers her own friends. Or... Companions? Coworkers? Allies? Aside from Natsuki, how many of these people does she really know?

"It ain't... It's not about the number of your friends. It's about the quality of your relationships, the strength of your bonds to each other, and the trust you have in each other that really makes a difference." She calls out to the dark electric child, sounding strangely less boisterous than she usually does. "You stick with the ones that really get you, you fight for each other, and you can kick any army's a-uh. Butt. Believe me, I've seen it happen!"

Should she be encouraging the 'enemy' in this scenario? Sure, she might be trying to mess things up for Hikaru and Lala, but it's not as though the ninja can just ignore what she said either. As she tries to get her game face back on, though, Futaba instead ends up hissing in surprise when the snagret bites right around and onto her entire leg when it pops out of the chasm. Instead of trying to fight directly against its oversized force, however, she opts to do just the opposite.

"Hungry for those little guys, huh? Alright... How about a big one?" A new ploy forms in Futaba's mind, and she gets right into it: She  transforms and shrinks herself down, taking on the shape of a pikmin (orange, with her usual green head leaf) and triple their size (still probably kind of small). She makes distressed pikmin-esque noises that just sounds like her trying to sound like them as badly as she always does while simultaneously thrusting her sheathed katana towards the inside of its mouth to start blasting flames at it from close range.
Natsuki Nuki Despite fighting in the acrid and terrible goop, Natsuki is not overcome by filth or slowed overmuch by the drag of mud-like muck. Even the cook off of the oily gasses of the fuel explosion bothers Natsuki aroundabout as much as the fire red Pikmin. Her muscular noose of clenched arms meeting impossibly around the throat of the giant bird-snake sees her sliding and whipped around the clearing. Still, she holds on, violently choking the Snagret's jaws open like a trash can she felt poorly about and joining Hikaru's stamp-the-canlever super punch in freeing. . .

. . . some of the little Pikmin whole, and others as faintly-fading soul images. Natsuki snorts, sharp and nasal, because for a moment she did think she could save them as Hikaru asked, and all of her power couldn't stop some merely-twisted wriggler.

"Keep them *safe*!! I--" Natsuki demands of Hikaru, wild-eyed in the moment, and is smearingly whipped away in a muddy whip while the Nottrigger-Snagret swings its loose neck away and sinks into the violent whirlpool.

Flung farther away, Natsuki trails a tight roil of stormclouds about her like an escaping mantle. Before slipping into the whirlpool, Natsuki contorts, sprouting spindle-spikes that arch wicked from her back and land her agile on three, then six, then eight burst-out arachnid legs. 'Hovering' with thunderheads curling from her heels on the rise of her extra legs, Natsuki lowers only slowly back to the surface, leering around. Chirping to her Pikmin, guiding them closer to her and to split them from the clinging goop, Natsuki shifts her weight more bobbingly across the deploy of her extra legs while she readies to pounce. A tremble in the ground causes her to spring and chirp in alarm at the same time--!

'Oh!!! It *wants* to eat them!'

"I'm gonna eat *it* right the hell back, let it try!" Natsuki growls violently, springing in a raincloud-trailing arc down onto the threatened Pikmin and the snagging jaws both. With two swelling gorilla arms that obliterate her sleeves with embiggening thews and levering open arachnid legs, Natsuki gets right into that beak and throws herself into the jaws to drag it open.

All, everything, for her fanged-mouth tail to grab the Pikmin by its pepper red head in a chomp and flicking the little red guy free. Yet more are arrayed on her back and the inside arch of her arachnid limbs for safety as a falling barrage of missile fire land all around.

"They're mine! These ones!! They're not your food!!!" Natsuki howls as she really challenges the crush force of the giant jaws with raw muscle and limb force back.

The whistle of missiles fall down, and the rise of vines tangle up, and Natsuki has too many precious cargo-guys to stay at ground zero of purification by missiles.

Springing out while hugging two armfuls of Pikmin, Natsuki tumbles to back to the goop and ground.
Hiromi     'Yeah! Milky and I just need to get a good chance to!'

    Well, that's good. If something terrible happens to Hisako, it won't be permanent... probably. Anything she can live through, without becoming someone different and worse, she can recover from, either here, or with her family. Maybe she should talk about that with Hikaru, later. But, for now...

    Hisako's suspicion seems proven correct, but her efforts are stymied. Her only solace is the knowledge that, if an attack from behind couldn't dislodge the cat-butler, then he would have surely been even more capable of blocking an attack aimed at Eyewon. If she could do it standing on the ground, she could take that elbow and heel strike and try to counter, but doing that on a moving platform controlled by an opponent is frightfully more difficult. It's all she can do to take each impact with a grunt, trying to angle for a better impact or to take it on her gauntlets. The elbow, she does, but not the heel strike, and doing either means letting go.

    She wobbles, slips to the edge while Eyewon flies shooting at other people, and then slips over the edge, hanging in the air for an awful, strangely calm moment, before her foot lashes out to catch a ~~tree~~ twig stuck in the ground, shattering it a moment after contact to create the counteracting force that propels her back into the air. She scrabbles, less than gracefully, on the edge again, but her gauntlets are strong, and that also applies to her grip. Strong enough to last, even if struck, for her to vault back onto her feet, and then go at Bakenyan for a second, more determined round.

    "I don't know you. But you started this fight, didn't you? You shouldn't have any complaints, then. Even if you're outnumbered. You need the strength to finish what you've started, and to accept when you've lost." It doesn't sound like either of those is going to be present anytime soon.
Merelisa Shaynore "Fantastic work, Cure Milky. That should make this much easier."

    "Lun!" Lilian's guess was right, the answers, reassurance, and praise have a tangible effect on Lala's demeanor. Literally, in fact, because in addition to the small smile that accompanies her eyes-shut not, there's a crackling wave of static electricity that buzzes off of her, and she redoubles her efforts in helping lift the gizmo and haul it outside to Lilian's lead.

"*Excuse* me, there was supposed to be a forest-encompassing *fireball.*"

    "Uh-! That's, like, a good idea! Bakenyan! Can we do a totally huge forest-encompassing fireball?" Eyewon twists around to look back at Bakenyan excitedly, but Bakenyan looks a little worried about the prospect. "My lady... we are in the forest." "Boooring...."

"If you care about her like you say, then you will be helping her by doing that!"

    Bakenyan shifts his grip on the tray, looking away from Sarracenia. "That... is.... Lady Eyewon is entirely capable of assessing the morality of her own actions without the input of a butler, and she's perfectly capable of accepting the consequences of them as well. My place is to stand by her side as long as I am able. If you listened to what I say, then you would understand that."

"You are jealous of the Precures! With their friends and their pretty outfits and cute ship!"

    "Hahhhhhh?! Dummy! Idiot! You're sooooo FREAKING stupid! My outfit is CUTE and yours is covered in MUD, idiot! You're like, totally making stuff up, that isn't even real, and you're SO annoying about it that I can't even turn you into a Nottrigger because it'll just expand all the STUPID ANNOYINGNESS in your STUPID heart and you'll just start ANNOYING all over the place like the annoying idiot you are! Iiiiiiiidiot!"

"It's about the quality of your relationships, the strength of your bonds to each other, and the trust you have in each other that really makes a difference."
"WAit do you want us to help you find your friends?"

    "That's all stuuuupid nonsense for *Precures*, not people who, like, have to live in the REAL world. Your stupid relationships are all built on being totally fake losers that LIE to each other, and *I* have the Dark Pen to prove it!" Eyewon, still flat on the platform but evidently having forgotten the tactical reason why, waggles the greeble over the edge to smugly show it off. "What it's REALLY about is being, like, powerful enough that no one can ever ever let you down! All the Nottraiders are just working together because we ALL get that, so it's *convenient*, and that's why we'll take your ugly little Star Drop and, like, conquer the universe with it!"

"Instead of relying on others who aren't there for you, work on yourself and trust in your own two hands! I know you can do it one day!"

    "Uh huh, uh huh, yeah! I've, like, built this Dark Pen, and this ship, and the Nottraider army, and, like, a billion other super cool things with my own two hands and just, like, Lady Mujinko's help, but she's totally different from the rest, and--" Eyewon cuts off and narrows her eye suspiciously over the edge of the platform. "Hey! You're just a stupid Precure sympathizer anyways, loooooser! You don't ACTUALLY get anything at all, so why don't you just get SQUASHED already!"
Merelisa Shaynore     Eyewon clambers to her feet and waves the Dark Pen dramatically down at the Nottrigger, and it starts glowing with a sickly light. Just then, Hikaru shouts up at her too, with a singular red pikmin held blithely above her head in two hands, presented like a prized trophy.

    Eyewooooooonnnn!! It doesn't have to be this way! If your Lady Mujinko's able to be different, then lots of other people can too, as long as you open your heart to them! There's lots and lots of beautiful things in this universe, if you don't make yourself see it all as evil!"

    "But if you can't open your heart yet..." Hikaru rears back like a baseball pitcher, starlight glow growing around her arm. "Then you'll have to at least stop trampling other people's today!"

    Hikaru beans the pikmin at high velocity directly at the pen in Eyewon's hand, and the vacant lil guy dutifully follows the command to snatch it in his little hands as he sails by. Hikaru leaps from star-platform to star-platform, racing to catch the pikmin, and greeble, in her arms before it falls into the woods, and barely managed to stop before smashing into the side of a tree.

    Her final command to the Nottrigger still went through, though. Energized and enraged, the monster dips in and out of the ground, snapping wildly at anything in reach, eating ice bombs and gunk spewed up by Depthcharge haphazardly in its attempts to swallow or crush the Elites. On the platform, Bakenyan stands between the now-disarmed Eyewon and Hisako, with his arms spread defensively.

"You need the strength to finish what you've started, and to accept when you've lost."

    "My apologies, but this fight is already over. My lady, may I recommend utilizing the power that Lady Mujinko has granted you?"

    Eyewon, backed up to the edge of the platform away from Hisako, nods rapidly with her lips pressed shut and pulls a black amulet from inside her shirt where it hangs from her neck. Unlike the Precures pendants, though, this one doesn't trigger any transformation when she presses it-- instead, a pitch-black sphere of darkness punches a hole in the sky, steadily expanding larger and larger until it lenses light around it and the black hole pull is tearing huge leaves off of trees.

    Just before Bakenyan boots her off and the ship is sucked up into the portal, Eyewon recovers enough of her voice to smug at Hisako, "See you, like, later, suckers," and then it vanishes behind Eyewon without a trace.

    Apropos of nothing, Lala awkwardly reassures Lilian, like she's sure she needs to hear it after the villain's display. "Um... I think your magic's really pretty, lun."

    After seeing Natsuki's success in baiting the snagret, though certainly not able to mimic her success in prying them free, Hikaru bounces a pikmin (not the brave soldier that retrieved the Dark Pen for her) up and down in her palm judgingly. She sticks a tongue out, squeezes an eye shut, and takes careful aim over around where the snagret last dove beneath the mud, and when she beans the red guy to set as bait-- it's stopped midair by a glowing heart-shaped barrier, and falls down into the mud.

"Star--!!!! How could you do that, lun?!"
"I need to set up our combo attack! And besides, I thought you hated the pikmin, Milky!"
"I *don't*, lun! They're cute and funny! I wouldn't *ever* sacrifice them like that, lun!"
"Then why...?"
"How come it's so easy for them to like *you* even when you're being so awful--?!"
"Lala... I...."
Merelisa Shaynore     It turns out, magical girl purification isn't the only way to make a Nottrigger go back to normal. Just, maybe, the most effective, and most familiar to the Precures. When Futaba lures the burrowing snagret up into Echolalia's vines with a delicious giant snack, it's stuck in place long enough to be battered with fire, missiles, hammers, and whatever else they have at their disposal, until a rattling cry and an explosion of iridescent sparkles peels the grey metal and toku mask off the innocent bird, and it slumps into the dirt, unconscious and covered in gunk.

    Lala turns and stalks away from it, lips pressed tightly shut and cheeks puffed slightly, antennae crackling. Hikaru reaches out a hand, and then drops it, detransforming with scuff marks on her face and clothes and an almost-teary frown on her lips. Lala gets back over to where she dropped the X-Ray Detector to rejoin the fight and leans back down to grab it, sounding stiltedly formal.

    "Lilian? Would you mind continuing to assist me, with lifting this part back to the ship?"
Combaticon > "That's, like, a good idea!"

    "Don't steal ideas from your peers!" Depthcharge shoots over her shoulder as Eyewon makes her escape, "Or at the very least credit me in the research!"

    Back in the smaller robot form, sizzling with laser burns, Depthcharge unfolds her left arm again and flips out a new weapon. Three barrels and a heavy energy feed that spins up as the weapon transforms into its intended shape. She shifts her midair stance, bringing the Scrapmaker up towards the thrashing Nottrigger beast as it draws near. The barrels spin up and-- the critter tears her arm off in its jaws in a shower of sparks and liquid Energon.

    With a grimace, Depthcharge floats back. The grimace becomes a furious scowl, but there's nowhere really for her anger to go. In the time it took for her to recover from the damage, the birdsnake has been subdued and pummeled back into its non-mutated self.

    The Decepticon descends, landing beside the unconscious beast. Crouching, she grips-- and pulls-- wrenching her severed arm out of its mouth. In the time it's spent disconnected from her, it even reverted back into an ordinary robot hand, which she uses to slap the creature in a display of petty, useless frustration.

> "Lilian? Would you mind continuing to assist me, with lifting this part back to the ship?"

    "I will assist as well," Depthcharge mutters, shaking critter slobber off her severed arm, "Between the three of us, reattaching the component should be a simple matter." Turning the arm about, she rams the torn metal 'bicep' into the stump with a spray of sparks. There's a series of clicks and pops, then metal bits reconnect. She flips her right hand into her forearm, producing the multitool from before, and starts on-the-fly repairs for the walk back to the ship.

    "At first scan, damage seems relatively light. If either of you are in fact injured, I am *regrettably* also trained in organic medicine."
Natsuki Nuki Rolling through the mud, dirty and wet, Natsuki is struck before the missiles-and-purification happens and hears a heartwrenching crunch. The Snagret, which Natsuki does not get her promised chomp on, goes through Multiple Consecutive Purifications, and the lure of Biggest Red Pikmin.

With big gorilloid arms, Natsuki squeezes and bounces her charges, looking among her little dorks and counting. The little bug eyes blink, save for two - one where her dark arm had been sawed into missing its leaf with an x.x expression on its little face in expiry, and a second with a slice taken out of it besides.

Chirping, whistling-cooking something like the hiccups of crying, Natsuki bounces the fading-to-spirit Pikmin in her good arm, and the reforming meat of the second. As weight leaves her arm from transmutation from plant-henchie to sad heavenward-bound spirit, Natsuki gasps in her birdsong burbling and reaches up in her muddy-goopy state to seize one big palm around the escaping spirit, and squeezing with a whisper.

"There'll be more golden honey. I promise." She promises to her closed fist, and the sprawl of goopy plant goobers about her goggle-eyedly sitting in muck and unled.

Natsuki takes a few sitting seconds pulling her own 'transformation' back in. Her arms deflate first, then with a slow arch and roll of her back the spider legs retract into the punctured remnants of her outfit, spinning fresh silk into place behind. Slopping off some of the goop with a flick of hand and snap of tail, the Osakan chimera rises to follow after Hikaru, making a few sharp whistles to summon her mud-dazed minions back to her, lessened by battle losses and scuzzed up by their efforts, and watches Lala split the burden of the part with Lilian.

Caught between what is best for her little guys with what she feels she has to do, for herself, Natsuki points at the part and chirp-directs, and a wave of dirty red guys go to help out Shittily Path with the part back to the cosmic bivouac. That safe and sorted... That left 'Futaba's Friend'.

"Hey Hikaru! Hold up!" Natsuki calls, moseying off into the forest after the minion-rogue magical girl.
Lilian Rook     'That... is.... Lady Eyewon is entirely capable of assessing the morality of her own actions without the input of a butler, and she's perfectly capable of accepting the consequences of them as well. My place is to stand by her side as long as I am able.'

    Truly, butlers and maids are blessed creatures. Lilian can imagine no purer life form.

    'you're SO annoying about it that I can't even turn you into a Nottrigger because it'll just expand all the STUPID ANNOYINGNESS in your STUPID heart and you'll just start ANNOYING all over the place like the annoying idiot you are!'

    Help. The villain is totally correct. Lilian shudders at the thought of it.

    'Uh huh, uh huh, yeah! I've, like, built this Dark Pen, and this ship, and the Nottraider army, and, like, a billion other super cool things with my own two hands'

    "That's right! Those things are yours, not given to you! It's because of them that you're able to do this well against this many people! I'm certain you can keep going!"

    'Hey! You're just a stupid Precure sympathizer anyways, loooooser! You don't ACTUALLY get anything at all'

    Lilian's morbidly irresistible upwelling of encouraging talk, huffed and puffed as it may be over the two-person carry, grinds instantly to a halt. 'Why am I doing this' wins out over 'do your best Eyewon' right on her face. Her expression falls.

    'You don't think about a word that comes out of your motherfucking mouth, do you?! Forget support staff; you never go anywhere without a tour bus of losers to do everything for you!'
    'Teaming up with the weak only gets in your way! I ditched my baggage to fight you seriously, and you still think you can just tag in someone else and outsmart me?'
    'I'm right in front of you and all you think you can spare time to think about them?! I can tell just from looking at you-- you're fighting me half-assed because they're all looking!'

    Once again, in another place and time, merely the latest entry in the never-ending chain that began the day she let herself think she had made it, Lilian wonders why she had bothered to reach out at all. A leaden weight in her chest sinks lower with each second she spends trying to remember a time that letting her guard down, grasping at a commonality, and trying to relate to someone else has ever lead to any feeling but this, until eventually that weight crushes the breath out of her lungs.

    'Um... I think your magic's really pretty, lun.'

    "Thank you." says Lilian. She knows it's a consolation. She knows it's over something silly. She knows that it's Lala's innocent mistake. But she still can't summon up any life to say it with.

    'And besides, I thought you hated the pikmin, Milky!'

    "When did she ever say that?"

    Don't get frustrated with the thirteen year old girl. This isn't the time. A lot is going on. They've just been through a lot.

    "Don't you remember what happened? She only didn't want to put them to work like that."
Lilian Rook     'Lilian? Would you mind continuing to assist me, with lifting this part back to the ship?'

    Lilian looks from Lala to Hikaru, her gaze lingers, then returns to Lala with the weight of reluctance to get between two friends like this. But her heart isn't in trying to keep them together. "Of course." comes out automatically.

    §How would I know the first thing about making up? I don't have any experience; I'm only ever trying to pretend that something else is the same. It's best for everyone if I keep my mouth shut and let them figure it out. Even these little girls would do better on their own.§

    She almost doesn't notice Natsuki's pikmin scurrying over to help. The way the weight in her arms almost seems to float as they gather around is only appropriate for her distraction.

    'I will assist as well. At first scan, damage seems relatively light. If either of you are in fact injured, I am *regrettably* also trained in organic medicine.'

    "Nobody needs you. Pick a fucking lane."