It's a bit like a little boy playing a game of soldiers with all his toys. The nuances are ignored and everyone gets arbitrarily assigned. A lot of those genuinely-grey moral characters will end up acting atypically under the imperative.




She's going to get forced by the imperative to pick a side. She probably suspects it will be the good guys, since that's who she has most recently identifdied with and associated with the most. But come midnight when the imperative triggers properly, she would be fully bending all her abilities and ingenuity to eliminate anyone on the opposite side.




The Dreaming Celestain has acted to neutralise a few powers that he believes might try to thwart him. I'm deliberately skirting rounds the "ultimate power" battles because piles of "I can do anything" types clashing is very difficult to describe well and sidelines the main protagonists of this story. As I wrote into the plot a couple of issues back, the sum effect of lots of uber-powers clashing is likely to be that they cancel each other out, leaving determination of the War to the "small fry" with more mundane Earthly abilities.

As usual, it's likely to come down to our regular heroes Lining Up!




The LL have doubtless done some major threat assessments, which include some of the following thinking:

1. The bad guys' known roster includes some major energy projectors. For example, Dr Roentgen can actually cause nuclear explosions. He could nuke Paradopolis and Parody Island at one second after midnight, taking out almost all the heroes and a multi-million strong local population. Since collateral damage will no longer matter to the villains (or posibly the heroes?) he and a bunch of other mass-damage types can just cut loose looking for an early easy win.

2. The only counter for this gambit is to have any hero energy-manipulators in place to deflect, redirect, or absorb such attacks. Kerry could probably do something about a heat bloom or firestorm, for example. Lara could shield the city - or just the team if the imperative changes her priorities.

3. The bad guys are bound to know what likely defences the heroes put up, so there might be secondary attacks designed to neutralise such defenders before they can interfere. For example, there are psionic villains who might try to shut down Lara or Kerry, or magic-wielding ones who can bypass usual defences with curses, or villains capable of mass-effect biological attacks. All of those would be less easy for energy-manipulators to counter; some would "get through" to Lara's energy form.

4. The LL therefore has to use ball-game style screening and blocking tactics, with others countering such interceptions before they can work. So Sorceress or Vinnie might need to prevent magical attacks from debilitating the energy manipulators, or Al B. might need to filter out psionic attacks with some invention, or whatever.

5. But of course, the villains will be trying to bypass those defences.

6. Informing all of this might be a bunch of seer-types who can predict and counter-predict what is coming up. So Chiaki might glimpse a gambit mere seconds before it occurs, but Morgosa might then predict how the now-alerted heroes will thwart it and how to alter a different future. And so on.

The upshot of this is that the battle becomes a fleet-style conflict with a range of smaller support craft screening warships and carriers. Both sides have "big guns" operators who are therefore also big targets, so some of what has to be considered is how to keep those "big guns" in play to go after their enemy counterparts.

Tactically the problem is that the vilains rather outnumber the heroes, so they have more ways to simultaneously attack at multiple points in multiple ways.

Finally, and this is one of the hardest aspects of the imperative, neither side will be allowed to show mercy or restraint; it is all-out war to the deaths of one side or the other. Those heroes who usually have no-kill policies will find themselves compelled to end their foes, even if those foes are restrained or unconscious. Those heroes with a save-the-innocents-first approach will find it over-ridden with kill-the-baddies-at-all-costs. There are some heroes who would rather die than do that, but the imperative won't allow them to.