2012-01-10: A Bitter Pill

It's a sunny day on 33rd street, traffic is bustling and everyone is caught up in the hustle and bustle of the day. It's New York. It never stops. So when it does... it's not done lightly. But peoples heads turn skyward, and cellphones come out, taking pictures and video of a man clad all in black descending from sky, drifting slowly down. Cold black eyes look around at the people gawking at him, then lands lightly on the pavement, walking through the crowd and boldly strides into the Federal Reserve, ignoring everyone as if they were so many insects.

An hour ago...

"Oh honey, off to save the world again?"

Courtney Whitmore, teenaged superheroine extraordinaire, pauses at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the rail, the other on her large golden staff and turns with a suspicious expression towards her mother. The smiling blonde woman holds up her hand, in it is a brown paper bag. The mere sight of it causes the masked teenager's face to fall in dismay.

"Moooooom! I'm //not// taking that out with me! Besides, I already have lunch money!"

"Do you know how expensive lunches are in the city? They're quite unhealthy, too."

Patricia Dugan looks up from her high chair as Courtney stomps past her mother, snatches the bag up in her gloved hand with chagrin, and then is forced into a goodbye-hug. Her younger sister is pulling on the corners of her mouth and making googly eyes at her. Stargirl makes the same face right back at her as she leaves by way of the back kitchen door, hopping easily up onto her now-horizontal staff to streak off into the daylight.

The lunchbag never made it to New York.

Now...

The blonde-haired, star-spangled girl is riding high above the city skyline on her staff, crouched down upon it like a blue-eyed gargoyle. She's tapping the touchscreen keys on her cellphone, texting a mile a minute while waiting for something BIG to happen! She didn't spend her free afternoons after school fighting crime just to stop some loser muggers or save kittens. She wanted SUPER-battles, danger, excitement, adventure, public praise! All the GOOD parts of being a super-hero.

Right now all she was doing was learning that Ricky Martin was trying to make another comeback. "Urgh... Isn't anything goin' down today? Drug deals, bombings, alien invasions...? I'd even take an anime-con riot!"

Lacking flight capability, Mend is doing the rooftop thing...and by sheer chance, good or bad, she happens to be on the building across from the Federal Reserve. Just in time to see the black clad man walk in. Oh dear. You know, that doesn't look good. The young heroine moves to the edge of the roof, peering down at him. "I really hope he's not planning on making a withdrawal," she murmurs, but given nothing's happened yet, she's just watching for now, planning a route of descent for when she needs one. She doesn't like this at all. His body language gives her, well, vibes.

The problem with insects is, sometimes they can be poisonius, or in large enough numbers, even consume the big creatures. Well... Emmy isn't like that. She's finally finished working on what she -hopes- will pan out in the field. So she's loaded a bunch of stuff into her newest invention. She's not sure how it's going to work.. but right now the spatial distortion effect seems to be holding up!

In she goes, and the lever is pulled. Suddenly, on the rooftop across the street from the gold reserve... mind you, Emmy didn't really target things very well. She just said... hrm, new york city. Map... and touched a spot on the screen. She has no idea where anything is in -that- city. Her city is Metropolis after all. Her device vanishes from her scrapyard in a shrill repeating sound that is also sounding on that rooftop in NYC. Fading in from nothingness, is a Police call box from Britain. Yes... she's attempted to make her very own TARDIS. The problem is... displacement is kinda making the spatial distortion which allows more to fit inside than the normal volume would limit... wonky. That -is- a technical term, Wonky. The door slides open, and Emmy tumbles out along with hundreds of pieces of various things as the TARDIS spits out everything she decided to store in there. A heavy coffinlike box careens out and slips over the edge, tumbling to the sidewalk far below. Good thing it's a -tough- coffin-shaped thing. All manner of gadgets are strewn about and she ends up lying on her back with a skintight bodysuit on that has blue glowing running lights on it. Tron anyone?

Lying there on her back, Emmy just mutters, "Ow... I guess I need to work on the distortion and displacement effects overlapping."

Black Adam strides into the building as if he owns the place, and perhaps.. in his mind... he does. A short glance at the guard who jumps up from his stool upon Adam's entrance. He's not exactly wearing Armani... But he keeps walking, ignoring the armed guards with impunity. "Stop!! Stop!!" The four men shout, pulling pistols from holsters and putting Adam in the crosshairs. He actually stops walking, peering at these new weapons with curiosity. "You threaten me? With... what are those?" He asks the men, ignoring their threatening scowls.

"Oh wow, Snooki's pregnant //again//!?"

In her boredom, Courtney has taken to browsing the web on her mobile phone, all but ignoring the city streets below her as she flips through the web pages of Google-News on the high-powered, unlimited-data-rate mobile device. The cosmic staff allws her to crouch upon its bent handle without complaint while the wind tries to toussle her hair into a mass of yellow tangles.

Every now and then the girl picks up her blue eyes and scans around as if actually expecting to see someone else hovering up where she is, about twenty feet above and to the right of a ninety-story New York skyscraper. Hey, the last thing she needed was some super-jerk to come swooping up behind her and reading her email. That was private correspondence!


 * BREEEEEP-EEEP-EEEEEP!*

The tiny little custom app in her phone begins chirpping at her, causing Stargirl to frown and close the web-browser, glancing at the small alert as Google-Eart pops up, a big, pulsing red dot centered over the Federal Reserve Bank. Trouble at the bank? That'd mean someone was probably trying to rob it! Terrorists or international spies or... or... well, only REAL bad guys would stand a chance of getting away with THAT kind of heist.

"YES!" Stargirl curls her fingers and pumps her arm in triumph as trouble rears it's head at last. A super-hero happy to see crime? That had to be a first. "Time to get it on..." Even as she pockets her phone, the cosmic staff veers sharply up and around as it takes Courtney Whitmore on a quick one-eighty and begins speeding towards the building in peril.

"What the..." That would be Mend, about to head down the fire escape only to have a TARDIS appear...and spill out its contents on the rooftop. She turns, hands on hips. "You'd better clean that up. Or you can help me stop the bank robber." She jerks a thumb towards the Federal Reserve. The alarms are probably going off, for that matter. "I'm figuring it's the guy in the truly bizarre fashion statement. It usually is." Says the girl in spandex.

Says the girl in spandex, to the other girl in latex and track lighting. Emmy sits up, and a few of her gadgets tumble off of her modest (by superheroine standards) chest. She reaches out and snags the ring at the base of a silver cylinder before it topples over the edge of the roof and mutter, "I know, I'll clean it up, I promise. It'll be easy but... huh?" she asks, turning around and looking down before asking, "Is that a bank?" Okay, she's a little clueless, but she's holding the silver thing in her hand and then notices how high up they are. "Oh, one sec." she says before dashing back to the pile of junk, tossing a hubcap, three different wrenches, a fire extinguisher, and half of an E-Z bake oven aside before she stands up and holds out a snowboard with... LED's and little pieces of what can only be a 1980's era tyco racing car track attached to the bottom.

"Need a lift down?" she asks as she sets the board down, steps onto it, and presses a stud with her foot. The board lifts to about three inches off the rooftop and she holds a hand out to Mend.

"STOP NOW or I'll open fire!" The lead guard shouts. All four men have weapons cocked and aimed center mass. "Out of my way." Adama replies and proceeds to walk forward. 'BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM' Rapid fire gunshots from inside the reserve, point blank shots into Adam's chest. Five rounds fired, five rounds stopped cold by the man's impenetrable flesh. Adam takes a step back, startled by the sudden noise of the gunshots.

His jaw clenches so does his fist. The man who shouted at him takes a fist to the chest, caving in his ribcage. Multiple punctured organs as his ribs turn to spears inside his body. He goes down in a cough of blood

Two simultanious backhands to the two flanking men, fractured skulls both of them. The last man screams and runs back into the maze that is the Reserve. Unmolested, Amad steps over the bodies and continues, seeking the signs pointing toward the vault.

"Just don't drop me!" Mend calls as she takes the hand. She hears the gunshots. They'd better hurry...she's fairly sure shooting that guy's worse than a waste of ammunition. Sometimes the bullets even ricochet OFF the super, which is always embarrassing. Not that she really seems worried Emmy will drop her. It's just a reminder.

The Cosmic Staff, coupled with Stargirl's natural agility, enhanced by the Cosmic Converter Belt around her waist, allows Stargirl to 'skateboard' more or less through the sky like some modern-day witch on a golden broom. She zips above the streets, giving a large, brace-baring smile and wave to the pedestrians below, then cuts through a thin alley, having to stand up and hold her arms out to the sides to squeeze between its narrow confines. By the time she passes the polic station, officers in blue are already running towards their cars. She doesn't have superspeed, but she's able to cross half the city in fairly short order thanks to her equipment's speed and handling.

The front doors burst open (well, they were probably already open with fleeing employees, the ones who don't have guns) as the leading edge of the cosmic staff strikes it's bullet-proof glass. Courtney has to duck low to avoid getting taken out by the top of the door and knocked off of her flying perch. Nonetheless, she catches the tail end of the exchange, guards flying every which way, looking like they weren't about to get up again anytime soon.

And if he could dish out that kind of punishment without even looking like he was trying, it was time to put her Game Face on. But hey, her and S.T.R.I.P.E. had taken out their own fair share of ne'er-do-wells, this one was no different! Right? ...Right?

"All right, bucko." The blonde snarls in her most menacing, kick-ass superhero voice she can manage, leaping off the staff's forward end, letting her momentum carry her closer to Black Adam's backside as the rod comes up to meet her hands. She swings it overhead like a sword, but rather than striking Adam with it, she points it dead level at him. "Try picking on someone your OWN size!"

A heated blast of pure energy, orange-yellow in its brilliance, streaks out of the rod and towards the intruder. "...Figuratively speaking."

"Hold on!" calls Emmy as she nudges the foot throttle forward and the board takes off. She's had time to practice with the board, and she spirals about downard before slowing down before braking. She learned the hard way not to stop before she slows down. Last time she did that, she flew right off the board in a painful manner. She skids to a stop almost like she was really -on- snow and ice before she says, "We're down, now go save the day!" And she reaches down, hooking her cylinder on her belt and drawing her ... um, gimicked up phaser prop toy.

"I'll be right behind you!" she says as she reaches to press a button on her wrist, and a helmet seems to -grow- about her head. Black and all... totally opaque from all angles. But she can apparently see out of it!

"Whoa, looks like we're late!" she says as she sees Stargirl make -her- entrance. "Shall we see if she might need a bit of backup?" And she's moving towards the bank now, lights powered up on her phaser toy.

Black Adam gets blasted hard, the blast taking him between the shoulder blades! It's hard enough to knock him forward and down to a knee. But once the blast ends, it's plain to see, there is no damage to him or his outfit. His head turns and glares metaphorical daggers at Stargirl. "Ahh the so called superheroes have arrived. But you err.. you have no hope of stopping me or even slowing me down. Leave or die." He tells Stargirl then turns and keeps walking. Its' on her if she wishes to tangle with him. He did warn her.

Mend frowns. "And he's tough, too." Too tough for her to take on directly. She's going to have to think of something unless she spots a weakness. Time to get clever... Although, for right now, she's staying on the board with Emmy. "Got any good ranged weapons?" All she has is flashbangs right now. Which probably won't do much other than a momentary distraction against this guy.

"Uhm..." The blue-eyed teen falters as the blast does far, far less than she had obviously expected it to do. The cosmic staff's rays were the strongest weapon she had available to her, in terms of sheer firepower brought to the table. When the man turns half-around and gives her the Death Stare, she holds her position for a moment, pointing the rod at him like some sort of strangely-dressed wizard.

Then she quickly puts it behind her back, as if that could somehow hide it, and backs up a step. "I- Er- Uh, can I just have a do-over?" But he doesn't even approach her, just turns with his strange, detached manner and continues walking on. She can practically feel the death threats and warning bells going off behind her eyes.

But Stargirl hides her fear and frowns down at her weapon as if it had betrayed her.

"Sorry, pal!" The rod retracts into a much smaller, hand-held version, and the young girl begins an acrobatic routine that starts with a forward hand-spring and quickly turns into a tumble and finally a full-over layout somersault designed to bring her face-to-face with the taller, and quite evil-looking male. "But I'm the sheriff of these parts and someone's gotta pay for hurting those gaurds."

A small gloved fist rears up and back as Stargirl comes out with a vicious right cross aimed directly at Black Adam's jaw. Her Cosmic Converter Belt made her inhumanly strong, but would that be enough? "And my vote's on YOU!" She shouts cheerily as she swings, preparing herself to spring away from any of those deadly backhands.

"You might say that." offers Emmy as she shakes the phaser in her hand. She looks in through the window and raises a brow. "Whoa, that man glows with power. LEt's see if we can't even the odds a bit." She twists the knob on the back of the phaser and the light there glows green.

On top of the phaser, a holographic aiming scope appears above the weapon and she aims it right at Black Adam. The phaser is set on... disrupt/dispel/weaken magic... however that might work on this crazy powerful guy. For all she knows, he might just shrug it off and ignore it. But she pulls the trigger and a translucent green beam fires right towards Adam... well where he was when she pulled the trigger. As far as she knows, the blonde cosmic gal might get in the way.

"I got more on my armor over there." she says as she fires, her other hand pointing towards that big heavy coffin like thing over on the sidewalk about twenty feet off.

Adam is the vicitm of unfortunate timing, and a well placed blow. Normally, Stargirls punch would have broken her hand and left Adam untouched. But his ankle gets struck by the anti-magic phaser, and suddenly he's far more vulnerable. Her right cross connects before Adam realizes something is wrong. He saw it coming, had time to evade the blow.. but he stands there and takes it, secure in her inability to harm him. Her fist takes him in the jaw and drives his head to the left. It still feels like punching steel, but this time he actually feels it.

His eyes widen as the pain spreads across his face. "Well done.. But tell me.. Can you take it?" He asks, and steps forward, out of reach of the phaser beam, and his full power returns. In the blink of an eye his right hand lashes out, not to strike... but to grip, fingers going for the girls throat.

Mend doesn't know how to operate the armor. Isn't going to try. Instead, she's going to sort of lift the arm and try to shoot Adam...albeit not from the best angle. It's really just something to do while she works out how to beat him. This beam works, but it's not enough on its own. Although any time she can buy those without powers to get out of the way is worth it.


 * KRACK*

The punch connects and actually seems to do some good! He doesn't exactly go down like she'd kind of been hoping he would, but at least he's not just smirking whimsicly at her. It stings her hand a bit, but no more than would really be expected hitting someone who could just shrug off her cosmic energy like it was nothing. Was he some kind of energy-absorbing mutant?

"I can take anything you can throw a-RRRRK!"

Stargirl's instinctive fighter's intuition knows a reprisal is coming, she even sees his arm moving. ...She simply isn't fast enough to get out of the way! Before she can spring away with all of her amazing agility and acrobatic skill, that ability is quickly nullified by the simple act of being GRABBED! Titanium fingers close around her neck in a Titan's grip, her hands instinctively flying to her throat, ripping at Adam's thumb, the weakest part of any grip, to try and somehow loosen the literal stranglehold and draw breath.

She bends and twists like a wild, paniced cat being held at length, her knee coming up towards the inner side of Black Adam's arm to get him to drop her, her foot lashing out at his chest to push herself away from him as she grits her teeth, doing anything she can to just get LOOSE.

And draw breath again. Breathing is nice. She'd like to continue doing it.

As Men opens the coffin and reveals the gleaming black armor, with arms just a bit longer than the arm that would be inside. Mend is able to reach in from the back and aim an arm at Adam... there's a grip inside with a trigger to pull. Quite intuitive. The palm's fingers open wide and the blaster in the hand fires. It's a fairly potent blast, a generic eldritch effect that streaks towards Adam's general location.

Emmy for her part, adopts a wide target stance and aims at Adam once more. She twists the dial to red, eyes narrowing as she aims and fires what amounts to a full force plasma blast.

Adam's grip is like few have ever felt before. To say it is like steel would be a vast understatement. Out of range of Mend's firepower and Emmy's magic disruptor, Adam is once more his invulnerable, godlike self. The only reason he doesn't simply squeeze and pop Stargirl's head off like a tube of toothpaste is because she is.. after a fashion.. cute. He has something of a weakness for beautiful women. But this one is trying his patience. "You are trying my patience girl. Go ho..." He trails off, being struck in the back by the girls combined firepower. Fierce energies flare against his magically armored back, then dissipate without effect.

Glancing back he raises a single black eyebrow. "Oh.. you brought freinds." He says simply, turning to face them and hefting Stargirl off her feet, his arm a beam of steel, unmoving and unfeeling against even her best struggles, his thumb pressing into her neck just to the left of her esophagus. However his grip is so tight that breathing would be near to impossible. He doesn't care that he's killing her. She attacked him. Calmly he faces his newest attackers. "She cannot harm me and neither can you. I am simply taking back what's mine. Go home."

Three choices. Run. Charge Black Adam and try and get him to switch targets to her before that other girl gets killed. Use the suit. Mend opts for...use the suit. Hopefully it won't be too hard...she understands engineering, but she's never used powered armor before. Making a mental apology to Emmy if she breaks it on Black Adam...ooh look. Girl in anime armor, incoming! It MIGHT give her just enough of an edge.

'I never really took it seriously. Maybe I should have. A LOT sooner.'

Stargirl isn't really aware that anyone is shooting at Adam, she doesn't see the beams that strike his back, because her eyes are starting to roll up into the back of her head.

'It wasn't just an after-school adventure anymore. It wasn't just a way to pass the time, a quick route to excitement and glory.'

She's easily lifted off her feet, after all, the girl weighs about as much as an ant to the god-empowered male. Her feet kick out with all of her remaining strength against Adam's torso, but it's strength that is rapidly fading.

'That was the day I lost my innocence. The day it became real. It wasn't just fun and games. People could die, people DID die. *I* could die doing this. I was terrified.'

Stargirl's limbs are beginning to feel a tingling numbness, her fingers fall away from the hand squeezing her throat and cutting off oxygen to her brain and muscles. She's not even wheezing, incapable of making even strangling noises.

'I became a hero for all the wrong reasons.'

Courtney struggles with her trembling muscles, trying to reach her hands up, but the action merely produces a few twitches in her arms and legs. Her limbs are going limp, hanging down languidly at her sides as her brain fills with panic-stricken thoughts of home and safety.

'But that was the day I decided I needed to become one for the RIGHT reasons.'

Narrowing her eyes, Emmy gets an idea. Oh, this is going to sting, quite a bit. She shakes her head and hits the accelerator on her hoverboard. The phaser is holstered and that silver cylinder emerges into her hand. A flick of a finger and a snap-hiss sound effect from a small speaker in the gadget and yes folks.. that is a lightsaber in her hand. She rushes into the building and aims for Adam... this is going to suck!

She aims the saber to strike at his face. What she's hoping is that she might prove a distraction, and the saber might blind him ever so briefly and maybe even weaken his grip enough for her to grab Stargirl and peel off to fly away. "Okay!" she calls out. "Use the needle launcher and follow up with knucklebombers!" she calls out towards Mend. Like the girl has any idea how to use that stuff. It's not like it's labelled or in an easy drop down menu. It's all hand controls and reflex.

Black Adam watches the Mech-clad girl charge him, and he actually smiles. They still mean to fight him. He can feel Stargirl go limb, see's her face turning purple as he's cutting off blood flow as well as her air. He's not interested in her death. She doesn't need to die for trying to protect the guards. She only needs to know he's not to be trifled with, and with her eyes rolling back in her skull. She's learned that lesson well.

Adam's grip relaxes, and releases her to fall to the floor like a blond sack of potatoes. Instead, he wills himself forward, and with a bluurr of black, he's inside Mends' reach. One hand opens ahd he seizes the suit by the chest, horrid squealing sounds fil the air as his bare fingers dig into the steel and he lifts her off the ground, ending her charge. "You're starting to annoy me." He tells her, then gets cracked in the face with Emmy's lightsaber. It does nothing to the man, his eyes adjusting to the flash faster then it harms him. "I did warn you." He says and pulls Mend closer to him. "SHAZAM!" He shouts!

As the word clears his lips, the roof above them ripples as if it were water and it spits a heavy bolt of lightning out, aimed for Adams chest! Of course.. Mend is in the way.

Ack. As he grabs her...she throws a punch towards his chest...that might, or might not do anything...right before the lightning hits her. Fortunately, it hits HER, not Emmy or Stargirl. The armor's toast. Apparently, so is the girl inside...or at least, she doesn't seem to be doing anything else right now. Could just mean she can't operate the thing any more, fried circuits sending off an unpleasant smell...nice thing for Courtney to wake up to.

That armor only really works because Emmy wills it to work. So... yes it's screwed as is Mend, but Emmy can -see- the power of the magic word ascend, and then as she glances up she can see more power coming down. "Look out!" she cries out as she hits her thruster to max and the board jets right at Stargirl. She leaps off the board as she cranks up her shields to max and basically attampts to divetackle her and use her own ... not insiginificant magical toughness to protect the blonde from the incoming magic nuke. When the lightning bolt strikes, and the smoke clears.. Emmy is unconscious, but alive. She seems to have skirted the edge of it as she slid with her blonde package into a corner.

When the hand drops her, Stargirl begins to fall towards the floor heavily, as if all of her bones had suddenly turned to liquid. Where a Titan's hand had been, there was now an angry red mark, the perfect outline of Black Adam's hand, around the exposed part of her neck that isn't covered by her blue costume top, which was rapidly beginning to turn into the livid purple of a monster bruise.

She's intercepted in her flight to the floor, her body bowing almost in half as she's all but tackled right out of the air, sliding across the smooth, cool floor with a strange woman she's never seen before on top of her. The world fills with light and sound, all of it exploding around her. Exploding, but not crushing her.

Courtney tries to get up, to thank her rescuer, to ask if she's all right, but all that comes out is a painful-sounding coughing wheeze from her raw throat as she weakly rolls over and sucks in precious oxygen in between sounding like she's about to spit up a lung. Damn, if she could have just reacted, her shield might have... but at least the other woman seemed to still be breathing, even if she was no longer moving.

Watery blue eyes try to pick out the figures on what had rapidly become a new battlefield. Everyone was down, for all she could tell, she was the only one still conscious! Courtney Whitmore, seventeen-year-old step-daughter of Pat Dugan, holds out her hand, the cosmic staff sliding into her hand from where she'd dropped it while sliding across the floor a few feet away. She rolls onto her elbow, letting out another one of those painful hacking coughs.

It was the closest she could come to telling him that he 'wouldn't get away with this'. Unfortunately, it was rapidly looking like he WOULD!

Black Adam is safe from the dispelling effects of his lightning. But everything else is royally screwed. The force of the blast cracks open the back of the armor he holds, probably frying the girl inside it. Windows to nearby offices blow out, and the floor around him quietly burns. "Pathetic. Next time bring bigger gun." He comments, relaxing his hold on the chest of the armor and letting it fall to the floor with a loud clanging.

Turning on his heel he walks away, following the signs to the vault, held below, in the farthest sub-basement, resting on the bedrock of Manhattan island itself.

Okay. She's conscious. She isn't sure whether she's going to stay that way. Unfortunately, Mend is having real problems getting out of the now non-functional suit...yup. She's stuck. This is the last time she uses somebody else's gear in a tough situation. Definitely not doing that again. Grah. She's helpless...and probably about to die. Again.

Bastard wasn't even paying attention anymore! She couldn't just let him get away with this, but she really only had one more option. And it'd probably end up with her dying. But she had to try. She was supposed to be a hero, wasn't she? That's what she'd called herself this past year. 'Hero'.

What a joke that turned out to be.

The Cosmic Staff extends to its full length in her hand at her mental bidding. Wheezing heavily, she drapes an arm over the thin metal pole, tucking it beneath her armpit, holding onto it with both hands as it hovers. She doesn't balance on it, she doesn't ride upon it by sitting as she normally does. The rod, for all practical purposes *drags* Stargirl across the floor, her boots scuffing up the nice floor as it races to help her catch up with the retreating backside of Black Adam. Which probably isn't difficult, considering he doesn't seem to be trying to hurry.

The girl in the robot suit was probably in bad shape, but Courtney was no paramedic. Aside from the thumping of Stargirl's dragging heels down the stairs, the first indication that Black Adam would probably have of her chasing him down in her rather pitiful state would be her hand reaching out to grab at his belt.

Her grip is much stronger than a normal human's, but it's much weaker than it was before. Which made her even MORE inconsequential compared to his strength. A simple backhand, even a flick between the eyes, would probably do her in by the way her muscles were shaking as oxygen-starved lungs wheeze more precious air to her body. She wanted to tell him that she wasn't done yet, that the fight wasn't over, not to be such a smug asshole. But all she can do is make scratchy, pained wheezes.

Provided she's not simply forcibly removed from his person, Stargirl uses Adam's belt, then his shoulder to pull herself shakily upright, letting go of her red, which consequently thumps to the ground. She reaches for his face, defiance and fight in her eyes, even if her body wasn't quite up to the task...

And, unless stopped beforehand, let's loose with the strongest blast of her belts shooting stars she could manage. This guy was organic right? Maybe she'd manage to fry his brain enough that he wouldn't just snap her neck for her impudence!

Black Adam actually stops, turning to regard the child clutching at his sash. Her blast of shooting stars takes him squarely, washing over him like a gentle shower. "Your fight is over child. You have fought your best and it was proven not to be enough. Lay down and rest. you have earned it." He says, reaching down and removing her hand from his sash, which has not budged other than bunching at the waist. A short tug to remove her grip and he turns to face her. He actually kneels and lifts her bodily, one hand under her knees and one behind her back. She can struggle and fight and squirm, it will make no difference. He will lift her and set her onto a couch in the lobby, making her more comfortable. She has earned his respect, a warrior unwilling to stop, enen though she must know she could be signing her own death certificate by attacking him again.

At which point, Mend has managed to get her way out of the suit and is...well, she charges into the lobby, then stops. Seeing what Black Adam's doing. Trying to work the guy out. She's really weak, she's *charred* in places...the annoying thing, really, from her perspective, is that she IS still alive. Right now, that actually sucks worse than being dead.

Her throat hurts, it's far too raw too allow speech. Probably for the best, or Courtney Whitmore probably would have spit in Black Adam's face and told him she'd rest after she'd kicked his ass good and hard. The tug on her wrist easily removes her hand from its grip, and she's lifted like a feather, planting a hand against the black-clad male's broad chance in an effort to shove him away. It fails miserably.

She sucks in a shortened, harsh breath, then another. Her eyes roll back and the toll of being strangled nearly to death overtakes her. She's unconscious even before she's laid out on the couch, the last blast she released having sapped what energy she had left. Her breathing is harsh and ragged, but is coming in the deep draws of one who is no longer in the waking world.

And there the hero known as Stargirl will lie until an EMT, some while after Black Adam has already departed, picks her up and puts her on a gurney to be taken to a hospital.

Black Adam leaves the girl on the couch, studying her for a moment. How was she able to hurt him? It was just a punch. but she hadn't managed to harm him before or since. He eyes her belt, and the staff she clutches. Be he cannot in good concsience leave here here defenseless. Not after beating her nearly to death. Instead he flies away, down the hall and down into the vault room.

He takes a moment to admire the workmanship of the door, but he cocks back and embeds his hand in the steel, and gives a mighty yank, tearing the door from it's three foot thick steel hinges, and ripping the deadbolts from the walls. The noise is horrendous, as he just drops the door to the side, walking into the vault filled with gold.

It's really very simple from there, lifting and stacking three pallets of gold bars, one on top of the other. A few thick electrical conduits are torn from the walls and he binds the pallets together. With that done, he simply flies out with the pallets, flying low leaving right out the front doors, the cops powerless to stop him.