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Moment of Awesome - The Stepford Cuckoos/Fourteen: How do you defeat the Juggernaut when he has the power of Thor? Make him take his helmet off and let the Cuckoos do their thing. Phoebe and Celeste grimaced as one as they fell back. Fourteen understood the logic in the idea, and as much as she hated to admit it (even to herself), the Juggernaut was exactly the wrong type of foe for her particular brand of conniving. All the subtlety of a rampaging rhino and half the intelligence made it so that he was, in many ways, too stupid to be tricked and too impulsive to be manipulated. It was why she'd been more or less forced into some generic-looking body armor by Doug as they'd prepped, including a matching pair of black leather jackets with green piping and hidden armored plating that she'd bet money belonged to Marie-Ange. Contrasting brightly against the black leather were a pair of red and white "Hi, My Name Is" stickers that someone had hastily scrawled "SPORTY" and "SCARY" across in black sharpie. Nearby, Fourteen's remaining three bodies (decked in standard issue body armor) ran crowd control as they herded the mass of people out of the area with a judicious application of psionic precision. "Just get that helmet off," Celeste said, hoping at least one or two of her team could hear her, "and the real fun gets to start." And until then, Fourteen would be dreaming up new and fun ways to absolutely murder Blink for naming her after the Spice Girls. The shockwave sent Alex stumbling back, and he straightened up, gaping. "My what? Uh, okay." Well, he had Kuurth's attention. Might as well take advantage of it. He clapped his hands together, arms lighting up with energy again. "Lezzgo." He raised his arms and fired. "Now this is a fight!" Kurrth's hammer was a blur, catching Alex's energy blast and glowing a brilliant eye-searing purple for a moment before it exploded in the enormous man's face. The crash was tremendous, but Kurrth never stopped swinging, or charging, even with a cracked and sparking hammer. "Clever to take advantage of this desert climate, wizard!" He spat a mouthful of sand in Alex's direction, and shook more from his face. "But you will not defeat me, no matter how much conjured grit and sand you create!" Laurie would normally touch a target in order to both give her a link to their body but also to make sure the people around her were less affected by what she could do. In this case it was impossible to get close enough to do that, and so she had to find something that would both do what they needed by also be subtle enough that she wouldn’t also incapacitate her fellow team members. What she settled on in the end was simply to mess with the systems that dealt with temperature control. Deathlok continued his barrage, concentrating his fire at Kuurth's head. Between the plasma blasts, the sand and the body heat and the force of Deathlok's firing, things had to be getting uncomfortable in there for the Worthy. Sweat dripped into Kurrth's eyes, for the first time that he could remember, and when he blinked, he could feel the sharp grit under his eyelids. It did no damage - his corneas were as strong and unstoppable as the rest of him - but it impeded his vision all the same, instincts from when he was soft, stoppable, weak. His eyes watered, he spat sand and could feel it under his tongue, in his boots, ground into uncomfortable places in his armor. He could hear and feel the pounding of his heart echoing from his ears to his mind through the helmet and back around again and it was maddening, he could not stop - not destroying, not moving, and he could not stop the sand and heat and heavy thud of his blood in his ears. He ripped the domed helmet from his face, throwing it away so frantically that it cracked the patched concrete street. "Cease your trickery mage, or be destroyed!" The moment that the helmet was off, Fourteen could feel him. That annoying fuzzy blanket that had been wrapped around what she could see but not feel had been torn away, and left in its place was the glowing beacon of a mind stripped bare. Even the natural defenses every cognizant mind created subconsciously had begun to fade, withering under the shade of an external crutch. There was no need to slip inside, as the front door had not so much been left open as kicked in, taking large chunks of the surrounding walls with it. It was nothing quite like 14 had ever seen before, and for a moment she considered preserving it just the way it was, as a monument to terrible ideas and idiocy. Two minds had begun to melt together, and even she couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. Were there a way, she'd almost want to study the gestalt. Psychically cut it apart just to see how it worked, and what practical applications it could be hiding. "Tch," Phoebe clicked her tongue, drawing attention her way. Kurrth slowed to pause his charge towards Alex. "You talk too much." A second later, it was over. There was nothing subtle or elegant about it. Instead, Fourteen ripped through what remained of Kurrth/Marco's natural defenses with a single focused strike, then followed it with another, and another, and another. Two dozen strikes in the span of a half second hit from all sides. And yet Kurrth still stood. "Strange," Celeste commented from her position nearby. Hands in the pockets of her jacket, she crossed the distance between herself and the Juggernaut. "That should have..." she commented, reaching out to give the comically larger man a push. Almost as if in a cartoon, he toppled over backwards and landed with a monumental crash. "Ah," Celeste tittered loftily. "There it is." She turned towards the nearby Alex, who was still on the ground where he'd been the target of Juggernaut's charge. "What can we say? You're welcome."